Re: Atom vs Polyglot

Julian Reschke wrote:
> 
> > In general, I think polyglot is potentially useful when content or
> > fragments that are usually served as text/html need to be included
> > in XHTML or other XML documents.
> 
> That is true, but the existence of a Polyglot spec wouldn't have
> changed the design of Atom. There was a big group of people who
> simply did not want to be bothered with generating well-formed XHTML,
> thus Atom had to support that mode as well.
> 

And yet, it wouldn't hurt the Atom spec if the XHTML serialization part
referenced Polyglot.  Sometimes it's desirable that there be seamless
transition within a toolchain between XHTML and HTML.  I forget the
particulars, but I worked on a project which used Xforms to manipulate
HTML inside of Atom.

The user-agent could only handle escaped HTML, while the server
toolchain was processing XHTML.  Working out what amounts to PG on my
own based on Appendix C, was a pain.  I doubt I'm the only developer
who's been there, done that; probably why I'm emphatic on PG even if I
haven't been expressing myself well of late.

-Eric

Received on Tuesday, 26 March 2013 04:55:29 UTC