whatwg / html

HTML Standard
https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/
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Suggestion: Use canonical spelling of other web standards #7159

Open j9t opened 3 years ago

j9t commented 3 years ago

In the copy (that is, not in references), the specification speaks of standards “HTML2”, “HTML4,” or “DOM2”. This is a noticeable difference to how the standards are officially called and being referred to (“HTML 2” or “HTML 2.0”, “HTML 4”, or “HTML 4.01”, “DOM 2” or “DOM Level 2”).

That similar standards (like “HTML 3.0” and “HTML 3.2”) are referred to like these standards are usually being called, suggests that this is accidental, at least that there’s inconsistency.

I suggest to use the names of the respective standards as they are named or as they are commonly called. (I volunteer to look prepare a PR addressing this, too.)

annevk commented 3 years ago

This is primarily section 1.6, no?

I suspect this was done to align with HTML5: https://blog.whatwg.org/spelling-html5.

Also, it's a bit unclear to me what canonical would be here, e.g., https://www.w3.org/TR/html401/ has "HTML 4.01 Specification", which is not how I'd want to refer to that.

(I also personally prefer the no space style, but not enough to attempt to block changes.)

j9t commented 3 years ago

Also, it's a bit unclear to me what canonical would be here, e.g., https://www.w3.org/TR/html401/ has "HTML 4.01 Specification", which is not how I'd want to refer to that.

Wasn’t sure how to best describe—here, I’d suggest “HTML 4.01”. I believe that’s how most people refer to and write about this specification.