Re: text/html for xml extensions of XHTML

Roger B. Sidje <rbs@maths.uq.edu.au> writes:

> Currently, W3C has a very clear position on this. One of the items in
> its "Common User Agent Problems" is that a valid MIME type should take

You mean   http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/NOTE-cuap-20010206, a *note*  ??

> precedence over anything else (no sniffing of the content, etc), i.e.,
> A document served as text/xml -> xml parser
> A document served as text/html -> html parser

The name of the XML version of html is "html".  The issue here is what
is the definition of "text/html".  The CUAP document does not address
that.

In the larger scheme of things the difference between html as xml
and classical html is small.  It's largely a technical difference
with the xml version being something that is easier to render than
the classical.

"text/html" is not just another content-type because, as the web has
evolved, it is the most important of a very small number of content-types
that user agents have always handled internally.

What is at stake is whether the xml version of html is going to gain
acceptance as the lingua franca of the web and, on top of that, whether
or not name space extensions of html are going to be accepted under
that roof.

In my opinion a user agent with an xml parser looks very bad if it rolls
over the top of a document containing the lines

  <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
     "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
  <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en-US" xml:lang="en-US">

without using its xml parser.

These lines are taken from  http://www.w3.org/ ,  which is served with
content-type "text/html".

                                    -- Bill

Received on Tuesday, 1 May 2001 08:14:12 UTC