Re: Authors response2: The Future Of XHTML

Sean, just one note first regarding your writing style. I find it very
hard to read your emails because of the odd quoting method you use and the
fact that you do not separate your replies from the original material.

Ok, onwards and upwards:

On Thursday, June 22, 2000 at 15:50, sean_b_palmer@yahoo.com (Sean Palmer) wrote:

> Mr. Connolly:-
>
> > "It just takes up extra bytes, so we left it out. "
>
> Good idea. But only for UTF-8 you say? How come?

No, the PI is entirely optional. It's presence does assist an XML parser
in determining the format of the document especially when the file is not
being served from a web server (such as if you save a copy off to your
hard drive and view it off-line).


> > Mr. Smith:- "Please provide a link to the page in question. Also
> > please understand that the W3C validator simply doesn't work at this
> > point with respect to XML based documents."
>
> http://www.wapdesign.org.uk/
>
> I realise that point. The errors that come up are as mentioned in
> Authors response 1.

When I run the above url thru the HTML Help validator I get many, many
errors. This is not a valid XHTML 1.0 Strict document. 

> > "The <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> PI is optional."
>
> Why is it included in the example of a minimalist XHTML document then!
> Surely 'minimalist' would have that line removed (it even says it is
> UTF-8.

I would say that this is an issue of semantics. The example is "a" minimal
XHTML 1.0 document but not "the" minimal XHTML 1.0 document. It is
possible to make a valid XHTML document which is shorter.

Here is an example of a very minimal, valid, but meaningless XHTML 1.0
document:

<!DOCTYPE html
      PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
     "DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html><head><title/></head><body/></html>


> > > A big question for this list: WHEN IS XHTML 1.1 going to become an
> > > official recommendation? Any clues? I know it is in it's last call,
> > > i'm just anxious!
> > 
> > When it's done."
> >
> Oh, don't I deserve more than that! Seriously, I don't expect an exact
> date, or even to within a month, perhaps a quarter of a year???!!!

Software is like art, it's done when it is done. What did Michaelangelo
say when the pope asked him when he would be done painting the ceiling?

> > "A DTD is an XML document."
>
> Try parsing it then!:

With what?

> Still, W3Cs DTDs are all text/plain though (and with
> the extension .dtd).

Yes and this means that when you access them with a web browser something
sensible happens as opposed to when you access the WML DTD. I asked the
WAP/WML list about this a while back and nobody cared to answer. Given
that the next version of WML is supposed to be based on XHTML 1.1 I would
guess it's beside the point now.


-- 
Christian Smith  |  csmith@barebones.com  |  http://web.barebones.com
PGP Fingerprint  -  60E5 2216 97D2 1D1A B923 F036 00A9 CEC0 D411 FA89

Received on Thursday, 22 June 2000 21:32:17 UTC