Re: Some thoughts on an extensible hypertext markup language

Arthur wrote on Friday, May 16, 2003 at 6:21:47 PM:

> What use would there be in a minimal version of XHTML?

On powerful desktop systems? Not a great deal. On the other hand,
minimal versions of languages are well suited to devices that aren't
capable of a great deal, or UAs that don't want to support more than
the minimum. Consider XHTML Basic <http://w3.org/TR/xhtml-basic>.

The abstract says
<http://w3.org/TR/2000/REC-xhtml-basic-20001219/#abstract>:

    The XHTML Basic document type includes the minimal set of modules
    required to be an XHTML host language document type, and in
    addition it includes images, forms, basic tables, and object
    support. It is designed for Web clients that do not support the
    full set of XHTML features; for example, Web clients such as
    mobile phones, PDAs, pagers, and settop boxes. The document type
    is rich enough for content authoring.

And as Toby said:

> Min-XHTML would be easy to implement by user agents as there is no
> styling, no scripting, no embedding and very few elements. It would
> be accessible because there is very little you can do to make a
> min-XHTML document inaccessible!

It's an idea, anyway. I'm not sure if Toby is aware of XHTML Basic,
which is similar to his proposal at a glance; although images and
external (but not internal) style sheets are allowed, among other
things.

Apparently "XHTML Minimal" would at present need to contain at least
four XHTML modules to be a conformant XHTML host language
<http://w3.org/TR/2001/REC-xhtml-modularization-20010410/conformance.html#s_conform_document_type>:
structure (body, head, html, title), text (abbr, acronym, address,
blockquote, br, cite, code, dfn, div, em, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, kbd,
p, pre, q, samp, span, strong, var), hypertext (a), and list (dl, dt,
dd, ol, ul, li).

XHTML Basic also contains these modules: basic forms (form, input,
label, select, option, textarea), basic tables (caption, table, td,
th, tr), image (img), object (object, param), metainformation (meta),
link (link), and base (base).

XHTML 2 Basic will be interesting, assuming it exists at some point in
the future.

-- 
John Lewis

Received on Saturday, 17 May 2003 00:21:31 UTC