Re: Signing Document and PICS

At 04:00 PM 4/6/01 -0500, Aaron Swartz wrote:
>Simon St.Laurent <simonstl@simonstl.com> wrote:
>
> >> Which may answer some questions. If your document is an XHTML page, 
> then you
> >> can stick it in since it is safely in another namespace.
> > Huh?  XHTML doesn't permit simply "sticking in" content which "is safely in
> > another namespace".
>
>Well the spec does say:
>
>     The XHTML namespace may be used with other XML namespaces as per
>     [XMLNAMES], although such documents are not strictly conforming XHTML
>     1.0 documents as defined above.
>
>So it's safe, although it may not be valid or "strictly conforming". However
>it is safe, since they won't be confused with HTML tags.

I don't think you've hung out with nearly enough "valid or it isn't XHTML" 
people.

It isn't safe, if only because making such claims seems to inspire 
significant violence around the right group of people.

And if you run those semi-XHTML documents through a validating XML 1.0 
parser, you've got big problems to deal with.

I'd love to see processing models which permitted such 'safe' use of 
content in undeclared namespaces anywhere inside a document, but I think 
RELAX - which offers a 'divide and conquer' strategy (see 
http://xmlhack.com/read.php?item=1109) - is about the only thing at all 
resembling that kind of processing in a validating environment.

Even making that work in this case would take some effort.


Simon St.Laurent - Associate Editor, O'Reilly and Associates
XML Elements of Style / XML: A Primer, 2nd Ed.
XHTML: Migrating Toward XML
http://www.simonstl.com - XML essays and books

Received on Friday, 6 April 2001 17:07:05 UTC