- From: L. David Baron <dbaron@fas.harvard.edu>
- Date: Mon, 24 Jul 2000 16:07:24 -0400 (EDT)
- To: www-html@w3.org
Section 3.2 of the XHTML spec has requirements for handling of "XHTML documents." [1] Section 5.1 says that XHTML Documents may be sent as "text/html". There have been a number of bugs filed against Mozilla arguing that our XHTML support is broken because XHTML documents are parsed loosely when sent as "text/html". The spec seems to support the arguments these bug reports make. If these conformance requirements apply to XHTML documents served as "text/html", then user agents that also support SGML-based HTML must (possibly in violation of section 7.2.1 of RFC 2616 [2]) detect whether the content sent as text/html is XHTML or not. The specification should say how they are to detect XHTML. It is unclear how to detect XHTML since an XML declaration is not required, and future versions of XHTML could have any FPI or system identifier in the DOCTYPE declaration. If these conformance requirements do not apply to XHTML documents served as "text/html", then the XHTML spec should say that. (Mozilla has other serious XHTML bugs, and neither Netscape nor Mozilla has promised to support XHTML. However, if this basic conformance question is clarified, I or others might try to improve its support. At this point, I don't consider it worthwhile because I don't know what supporting XHTML means.) -David (Speaking only for myself, and not for any other organization.) [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/#uaconf [2] http://www.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/http/rfc2616.txt L. David Baron <URL: http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~dbaron/ > Rising Junior, Harvard Summer Intern, Netscape dbaron@fas.harvard.edu dbaron@netscape.com
Received on Monday, 24 July 2000 16:07:26 UTC