Re: text/html for xml extensions of XHTML

Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:

>> But does Mozilla call its xml parser for http://www.w3.org/ ?
> 
> Nope. If it did, ...


I think the following are indicative of bugs in Mozilla and W3.org. I think
others would agree with my belief that we should be less forgiving of
mistakes in XHTML documents then we have been with HTML documents. It is my
hope that browsers that understand XHTML will do their best to inform users
when it encounters an invalid or broken page.

See also the recent ALA article, "Forgiving Browsers Considered Harmful":
    http://www.alistapart.com/stories/forgiving/

> it would render the page without any expanded
> character entity references, since Mozilla is not a validating parser
> and thus skips parsing the DTD and thus doesn't know what &nbsp;,
> &middot; and &copy; are.

Mozilla's XML parser should be smart enough to recognize the HTML DTDs and
thus expand these entities properly, even if it doesn't validate the page
(which I believe it should).

> Not to mention that it would end up ignoring
> the print-media specific section of the stylesheet, which uses
> uppercase element names and thus wouldn't match any of the lower case
> elements (line 138 of the first stylesheet),

This appears to be a mistake in the W3C's stylesheet. I have sent them an
email.

> and it would use an
> unexpected background colour for the page because the stylesheet sets
> the background on <body> and not <html>, which in XHTML will result in
> a different rendering to the equivalent in HTML4 (same sheet, line 5).

I have not heard of this change before. Can you point me to the section of
the XHTML spec that defines this?

-- 
[ Aaron Swartz | me@aaronsw.com | http://www.aaronsw.com ]

Received on Tuesday, 1 May 2001 23:00:10 UTC