XHTML or not XHTML, that is the question.

The current title of our guidelines doc is:  Authoring Techniques for
XHTML & HTML Internationalization 1.0.  I'm wondering whether we
shouldn't just strike the XHTML part and limit ourselves to HTML..

I'm not proposing that we change anything before publication of the
first WD - this discussion relates to the next iteration.

Reasons for thinking this:

-	Our discussions on this point during the FTF were not very
conclusive, though we noted the potential for issues when talking about
XHTML served as XML - we weren't very clear what these were likely to
be, however.

-	My understanding is that you can't successfully serve xhtml as
xml yet to the general population - certainly IE doesn't support it, and
that's a large chunk of the population.  I wonder, therefore, about the
value of dealing with it right now - though I don't exclude it from a
future version of the guidelines.

-	If we don't talk about xhtml served as xml in the guidelines,
then we are really only talking about html.  Having said this, I think
we should definitely continue to refer to xhtml served as text/html
where differences appear, eg. xml:lang and encoding declarations and we
should continue to provide all examples in xhtml syntax.

-	Eliminating xhtml as xml will halve the amount of testing we'll
need to do.


If we went this route, we should add a section to the intro and text to
the abstract indicating that we also cover xhtml 1.0 served as
text/html, and explaining what that means.


So, in summary, I guess I'm proposing 2 things:

1.	that we don't consider xhtml served as xml in our guidelines for
now

2.	if we go with (1), that we consider simplifying the title.


Please send in your thoughts to the list so we can have a brief but
productive discussion on Wednesday.  Thanks.

RI



============
Richard Ishida
W3C

contact info: http://www.w3.org/People/Ishida/ 

http://www.w3.org/International/ 
http://www.w3.org/International/geo/ 

See the W3C Internationalization FAQ page
http://www.w3.org/International/questions.html

Received on Monday, 22 September 2003 11:29:18 UTC