Re: Suggestion: Freeze and standardize public ids in Mozilla's DTD catalog

In article <[email protected]>,
 Jonas Sicking <[email protected]> wrote:

> Henri Sivonen wrote:
> > I, therefore, suggest freezing the set of magic public ids Gecko knows 
> > about at Firefox 3, documenting Gecko's magic pseudo-DTD catalog and 
> > offering the documentation to the W3C HTML WG and WHATWG for suggested 
> > inclusion as part of UA requirements for processing XHTML5.
> > 
> > Opinions?
> 
> This sounds like a fine idea. The only thing I'd add is that future web 
> specs might increase this list. For example it would have made sense for 
> the MathML and SVG specs to state that in order to implement the spec 
> the UA should add a particular DTD to its DTD catalog.

The crux of my suggestion was *never* to add new public ids. Concretely, 
this would mean refusing to recognize any public id that MathML 3 might 
define and preferably convincing the WG not to define any. (The SVG WG 
has already ditched DTDs.)

Consider the two scenarios for MathML 3:

1) A future Firefox doesn't add MathML 3 public ids. Authors will use a 
MathML 2 public id to import entities or, more likely, use UTF-8 or 
numeric character references. These will probably be generated 
automatically by MathML authoring tools at that point. The resulting 
pages degrade gracefully in older Firefox releases.

2) A future Firefox adds MathML 3 public ids. Authors use the new public 
ids and reference character entities--even if only "old" ones that 
existed in the MathML 2 DTD. The user experience in older Firefox 
releases is about as ungraceful it can get short of crashing: the YSoD.

-- 
Henri Sivonen
[email protected]
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/