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Re: texi2html output validity

From: Stephen J. Turnbull
Subject: Re: texi2html output validity
Date: Wed, 24 Dec 2014 12:27:25 +0900 
Yuri Khan writes:

 > As of this past October, that transition period is over.

Just plain wrong.  The transition period *never* ends, as long as
there are any documents specifying older standards, or browsers
supporting them.  Transitional standards are a compatibility tool, not
a mandate.  And there is good, valid reason why RFCs aren't called
"standards" (despite being effectively so) and why W3C standards are
called "Recommendations", not "standards".  Publishing information to
the 'net is not like connecting to the electric power grid.

Support will be phased out, and eventually you may need to write a new
program to display HTML 3.2 that appears in some archeological dig, of
course.  But publication of a standard doesn't obsolete all the older
standards immediately.  In fact, in the case of RFCs it's in practice
the reverse: when 99% of implementations conform to an RFC, that's
when the IETF promotes it to "Internet Standard".

If you want Info-HTML to conform to HTML5, that's fine, and there are
valid arguments for it.  But please don't claim the sanction of the
W3C for that, because there isn't any (especially not in GNU projects,
but that's another story).

 > >> * the encoding declaration <meta> should be the first thing in <head>;
 > >
 > > What would be the reason for that?
 > 
 > Because the HTML specification says[2] the encoding declaration must
 > appear within the first 1024 bytes of the document, and including any
 > kind of document-provided content before the encoding declaration
 > might cause a violation of this rule.

AFAIK the encoding declaration is optional, defaulting to UTF-8.  In
that case, we can (and IMHO *should*, but I am no longer an expert on
current encoding practice) require that our software generate UTF-8
and omit the declaration.  Non-UTF-8 should be invalid in Info-HTML.
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