Re: XHTML or not XHTML, that is the question.

At 16:28 03/09/22 +0100, Richard Ishida wrote:

>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.

ok.


>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 current guess (I might be wrong) is that these issues only
affect a small subset of our techniques, in particular section 2.
For the rest of the document, things should pretty much be the
same for HTML and XHTML (both served as text/html and served as
xml).


>-       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.

There are people who do negotiation, i.e. the same file is sent as
text/html to some browsers, and application/xhtml+xml to others.


>-       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.

To the largest extent, we are in this case talking about XHTML.
Also, if we want to see XHTML as an upgrade path for the future,
I think it wouldn't be a bad idea to consider XHTML served as xml,
because that makes sure that we recommend something that will
continue to work.


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

For some items. For others, there should be no difference at all.


>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.

Overall, i think we should consider XHTML served as xml.


Regards,    Martin.

Received on Tuesday, 23 September 2003 18:01:10 UTC