The WHATWG Blog

Wiki collaboration to describe HTML5 microsyntaxes

November 20th, 2007 by Henri Sivonen

Currently, Validator.nu mines the HTML 5 spec for UI text describing permissible content models, element contexts and element-specific attributes. The text is shown when an element or attribute is misplaced on missing.

Unfortunately, the spec does not contain similarly extractable text for microsyntax descriptions. Microsyntaxes are syntaxes that appear mostly in attribute values—for example, HTML5 integer, Web Forms 2.0 week, RFC 2616 media types (aka. MIME types) or CSS3 Media Queries.

Based on IRC discussions, there is interest in producing the descriptions collaboratively. To that end, I have seeded the WHATWG wiki with a page for microsyntax descriptions. If you would like to help make validator messages better, please feel free to edit the wiki (under the MIT license).

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 20th, 2007 at 13:45 and is filed under Conformance Checking, Syntax. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.