[html4all] removing document conformance from HTML5?

[Robert J Burns]

Hello 4All,

Surprisingly Maciej today raised the prospect of removing document  
conformance criteria from HTML5[1]. It's never clear what something  
like that might mean, especially with Maciej. However, I think this  
could go a long way to addressing the problems with HTML5. HTML5 could  
make a fine UA behavior and interoperability specification. However,  
the changes in document conformance – both additions and subtractions  
– are a disaster.

Rob Sayer has also been proposing something similar[2][3] within the  
mozilla community, but has largely been shouted down and overwhelmed  
there by the WhatWG crew.

To me this could open up the possibility of a more positive HTML  
vocabulary specification developed elsewhere without what I view as a  
WhatWG sabotage. Its also possible that the situation of just leaving  
HTML4 as the continued specification for HTML vocabulary would be the  
default. As much as I'd like to see improvements to HTML – which is  
what drew me to the HTML WG in the first place – it seems that the  
WhatWG had a very different goal in starting this project. While HTML4  
could remain the document conformance specification in the meantime,  
the HTML5 specification could then refocus on UA conformance:  
specifically parsing of text/html, DOM behavior, rendering and other  
UA behavior. Eventually perhaps XHTML2, HTML4All, or another effort  
could be started to advance the HTML vocabulary and develop newly  
evolving document conformance criteria.

Any thoughts? This idea keeps getting floated in various places and  
I'm interested in the opinions of this group.

Take care,
Rob

[1]: <http://krijnhoetmer.nl/irc-logs/whatwg/20090228#l-251>
[2]: <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=478665>
[3]: <http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.platform/browse_thread/thread/c2bbb6ed726800b/c2257e62819b9401 
 >