Re: Processing Instructions, not Magic Comments

On Sun, 1 Jul 2001, Ian Hickson wrote:

> Yes, it is argued that XML declarations should not appear in XHTML
> documents intended for Tag Soup parsers.

I think we're agreed that this - the desirability/advisability of
intending XHTML documents for Tag Soup processors - is a bass-ackwards
approach to progress.
 
> I'm still looking for a good reason to write websites in XHTML _at
> the moment_, given that the majority of web browsers don't grok
> XHTML. The only reason I was given (by Dan Connolly [1]) is that
> it makes managing the content using XML tools easier... but it
> would be just as easy to convert the XML to tag soup or HTML
> before publishing it, so I'm not sure I understand that.

Agreed.  (And at that, why restrict oneself to XML tools?  SGML tools 
work too.)

> And even then, having the content as XML for content management is
> one thing, but why does that require a minority of web browsers to
> have to treat the document as XML instead of tag soup? What's the
> advantage of doing that? And even _then_, if the person in control
> of the content is using XML tools and so on, they are almost
> certainly in control of the website as well, so why not do the
> content type munging on the server side instead of campaigning for
> UA authors to spend their already restricted resources on
> implementing content type sniffing?

Well said.

Is the perceived lack of Content Negotiation the real problem here,
that we have to scrounge for workarounds?



Arjun