XHTML1: Appendix C.14 seems misplaced and flawed

Dear HTML Working Group,

  I told you at least twice already, but I will say it again. Appendix
C.14 in the XHTML 1.0 Second Edition Recomendation seems misplaced, it
states already in the heading

[...]
  C.14. Referencing Style Elements when serving as XML
[...]

While the entire appendix is about *serving as HTML*. So what is the
section doing there? What is the actual requirement for authors who
wish to deliver their XHTML documents to legacy user agents? I am
unable to work that out. It seems that this should be mentioned in
section 3.1, "Document Conformance".

But before you do that let me point out again why this section makes no
sense at all. If there is some kind of user agent that does not support
<link> to reference style sheets, the <style> element or the style
attribute, it is most certainly not a XHTML user agent and would thus
most likely not support other XHTML features like hyperlinks, scripts or
forms which already makes it a rather questionable effort to introduce
redundant markup to somehow improve a completly broken presentation of
the document. The user agent would further most likely lack a default
style sheet for XHTML documents so that the presentation is likely a
broken mess of the possibly colored concatenated character data of the
document as the initial value for the 'display' property in CSS 2.0 is
'inline'. I thus completly fail to see how this could possibly add
considerable value to a considerable percentage of existing XHTML
documents. It does not even make sense for XHTML user agents as those
are not required to support the xml-stylesheet processing instruction.
And that is just the most significant flaw of the section.

regards.

Received on Monday, 12 July 2004 00:14:43 UTC