Re: Validating XHTML5 with XML entities

On Tue, 26 Aug 2008, Jeff Schiller wrote:
> 
> Can you clarify how user agents and validators will know content is 
> XHTML 5 as opposed to XHTML 1.1?  Particularly if the DOCTYPE can go 
> missing, I'm a bit confused by this.

An XHTML5 user agent doesn't need to know the difference; HTML5 defines a 
superset of the conformance requirements of XHTML 1.1.

For the purpose of validation, you can ask the validator to tell you if 
the document is valid for any conformance level; indeed, I would recommend 
that a validator whose users care about multiple versions of XHTML just 
validate to all the various versions at the same time, and report "Valid 
XHTML 1.1 and XHTML5" or "Valid XHTML 1.1 but not valid XHTML5 because..." 
or whatever.

XHTML 1.1 documents will only be valid with an XHTML 1.1 DOCTYPE, though, 
so a validator could just trigger on that and decide to always check such 
documents against XHTML 1.1 as opposed to anothe version.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Wednesday, 27 August 2008 00:44:42 UTC