Re: xhtml 2.0 noscript

* Mark Birbeck wrote:
>when exactly do you think an inline occurrence of document.write()
>would be executed in an XHTML document?

When control is passed to the function call, which happens some time
after control is passed to the program where the call appears in. It
depends on the context of this program when this happens. HTML 4.01
states this is when "the document loads" for <script>. Not after the
document has been fully loaded.

>[...]

None of this is relevant. To make your argument sound, you will have
to demonstrate a genuine difference between the two SGML applications
HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.x that implies document.write() makes sense for
only one of them, and defend this difference in the light of existing
implementations to make it practically relevant.

>The problem with this approach is that once again the XML spec doesn't
>allow for this processing model. The specification for XML only deals
>with the idea of a conceptually complete XML document being passed
>through to some application, and we should stick with that.

The model is: an XML processor reports information about a data object
to an application. The XML specification does not say anything about
how or when this information is passed to the application; it does not
even depend on the data object being an XML document. You are trying to
say the XML processor must first collect all information and then pass
it to the application in a single transaction. There is no requirement
whatsoever in the XML specification to back that up. It is incorrect to
say that the XML specification does not allow for the SAX processing
model. Ridiculous, in fact.

>If we didn't take this approach, we would have two different ways that
>an XHTML processor could behave, with the difference being determined
>by how implementers had decided the XML should be fed from the XML
>processor to the XHTML application, and this is certainly bad
>practice.

We do have many different ways in which XHTML user agents may behave,
this has nothing to do with document.write(). Again, you are trying to
argue that <script> execution should be delayed until after the whole
document has been transformed into a tree, so differences in the im-
plementation of progressive processing are not exposed to authors and
users. That may or may not be desireable, but as it stands, none of
the HTML or XHTML specifications include a requirement to this effect.
And implementations disagree.
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Received on Saturday, 29 July 2006 17:22:18 UTC