Re: WD-xhtml2-20050527: img element not required

Laurens Holst wrote (with snippage):
> Anne van Kesteren wrote:
> 
>> Laurens Holst wrote:
>>
>>> I think XHTML 2.0 should allow alt="..." as an alternative to 
>>> enclosed alternate text. It could be used until content inside an 
>>> element is sufficiently supported by all major browsers.
>>
>>
>> I think that would mean that you take the ugly bits of HTML 4.01 
>> forward into XHTML 2.0. IMG was supposed to be replaced by OBJECT back 
>> then as IMG is not really backwards compatible. Browsers have to 
>> recognize the element in order to view its fallback content.
> 
> 
> But that has already happened with h1...h6, which are pretty ugly as 
> well I’d say. Why not take that a little further and really make it work 
> in ‘legacy’ (heh) clients.

This has already been done, it was one of the objectives of XHTML 1.0. 
(See the HTML Compatibility Guidelines of the XHTML 1.0 Recommendation 
<http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/#guidelines>.)

It wouldn't make XHTML 2 any more compatible with "legacy" user agents 
anyway -- XHTML 2 achieves this compatibility through a user agent's 
understanding of XML[1] (plus CSS and/or XSLT) rather than any intrinsic 
knowledge of HTML 4 or XHTML 1.

(N.B. I'm Ccing this to www-html rather than www-html-editor because I 
believe it's more on-topic there.)

Regards,

Dave

[1] It's sent with a media type like application/xhtml+xml or
     application/xml, never with the text/html media type.