Re: XHTML2 MIME type

Henri Sivonen wrote:

> On Sunday, May 11, 2003, at 12:20 Europe/Helsinki, Christoph Schneegans 
> wrote:
> 
> > Henri Sivonen wrote:
> >
> >> Non-validating parsers don't have to process external entities.
> >
> > This is what <http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml#include-if-valid> says, but
> > does it apply to XHTML user agents?
> 
> It does, if XHTML is an application of XML and doesn't normatively 
> require a validating XML processor to be used.
> 
> > I expect a browser that accepts "application/xhtml+xml" to support 
> > XHTML,
> > not just generic XML.
> 
> I expect a browser that supports a language that is an application of 
> XML to parse that language using a conforming XML-processor with no 
> special casing introduced at the XML processor level.

If that were the intent, then why have any of the application/*+xml 
MIME types. We could have just application/xml. I expect a user agent 
which accepts application/xhtml+xml to be aware of certain things 
including the entities that XHTML1 uses. That is why I and many others 
consider Opera's implementation of application/xhtml+xml to be broken.

> > In <http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/#uaconf>, the XHTML specification says
> > about conforming user agents:
> >
> >   "If it encounters an entity reference (other than one of the entities
> >   defined in this recommendation or in the XML recommendation) for 
> > which
> >   the user agent has processed no declaration ..., the entity reference
> >   should be processed as the characters ... that make up the entity
> >   reference."
> 
> That looks like specifying things that are in the realm of the XML spec.

As I said above, the distinction is between application/xhtml+xml and 
application/xml. If an XHTML1 document were served/accepted as 
application/xml then dereferencing only the core XML entities would be 
acceptible.   <http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/#uaconf> carries the clear 
implication that a user agent that accepts application/xhtml+xml should 
dereference the XHTML1 entities as well as the XML entities.

Received on Sunday, 11 May 2003 18:26:58 UTC