Trying to think about the most important requirements for HTML for 
developers. Here's a comment I made earlier today:

> HTML is not just data for web browsers, it’s data that can be used in 
> many different applications, or transformed into other HTML 
> representations to be presented in different ways.
>
> This data is used together with data from other source. For screen 
> scraping and data integration, it is common for some of the content to 
> be HTML content, and other content to be represented as XML (the 
> original source may or may not be physical XML). These tools should be 
> able to work on all the data the application needs.
>
> If HTML is only data that can be read by human beings in web browsers, 
> it’s much less valuable.
>

At first blush, I think the main requirements are:

1. Provide an XML representation that uses namespaces correctly
2. If the native HTML representation is not XML, make sure that the XML 
and HTML representations round-trip correctly
3. Use namespaces correctly even in the HTML representation when merging 
vocabularies
4. (Preferably) Require web browsers to support either encoding

Is this about right? If not, what *are* the real requirements for a good 
HTML syntax for those of us who process HTML as data downstream, 
transform it to other HTML dialects, etc?

Jonathan





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