Re: XHTML and MIME

"Mark Birbeck" <mark.birbeck@x-port.net> wrote in message 
news:640dd5060609010619t4c7d6a88n251b2e28ad81bd27@mail.gmail.com...
>
> Hi Anne,
>
>>   5. "XML parsing failed: syntax error (Line: 8, Character: 0)" in Opera;
>
> That's interesting...does failing to parse properly necessarily have
> to prevent rendering?
>
> In Sidewinder we validate the XHTML against the XML schemas in one
> thread, and do some processing on the document before passing it to a
> renderer in another thread. (Current renderers are IE and Gecko.) This
> means that you'll always see something. We did it this way for two
> reasons; firstly, because most of the content that claims to be XHTML
> is actually invalid, so there wouldn't be a lot to see! And secondly,
> because we felt that the ability to know whether something was valid
> or invalid was most probably something that authors and developers
> wanted, but most likely means little to an end user.

It's a common misconception that the XML 1.0 requirement that on a 
validation error that data be stopped being parsed to the application in the 
normal fashion means that UA's cannot render it.  I don't know why this 
misconception exists, but it's generally used a stick to beat XML based 
languages.

The sidewinder approach is an extremely sensible one, indeed the only 
sensible one that I can think of.

Jim.

Received on Friday, 1 September 2006 13:28:02 UTC