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Re: text/html for xml extensions of XHTML

From: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
Date: Wed, 2 May 2001 16:54:49 -0700 (Pacific Daylight Time)
To: Aaron Swartz <aswartz@swartzfam.com>
cc: "William F. Hammond" <hammond@csc.albany.edu>, <mozilla-mathml@mozilla.org>, <www-talk@w3.org>
Message-ID: <Pine.WNT.4.31.0105021651550.1004-100000@HIXIE.netscape.com> 
On Wed, 2 May 2001, Aaron Swartz wrote:
>
> Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:
>
>>>> 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).
>> (If it did, you couldn't arbitrarily use namespaces.)
>
> I don't know if this is possible with Mozilla's current technology, but
> ideally it would validate the XHTML only within the HTML namespace (and the
> attribute space).

Forget Mozilla's current technology -- that's not even possible within the
W3C's technology. XSchemas are supposed to be the way to do that.


>>>> 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?
>> The HTML WG have asked the CSS WG to not extend CSS2 section 14.2 [1]
>> paragraph 4 to cover XHTML.
>>
>> [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/colors.html#q2
>
> This seems very strange -- can you elaborate on the reasoning for this or is
> it Member-Confidential?

I'll defer to Steven Pemberton and Chris Lilley the chairs of the HTML and
CSS working groups respectively for the exact reasoning -- as far as I
know, though, it's just that the HTML WG wish to remove any "special
casing" of HTML in other specs. Rightly so, IMHO. The body->html backwards
background propagation rule is extremely hard to get right (as far as I
know, no browsers do it right).

-- 
Ian Hickson                                            )\     _. - ._.)   fL
Invited Expert, CSS Working Group                     /. `- '  (  `--'
The views expressed in this message are strictly      `- , ) -  > ) \
personal and not those of Netscape or Mozilla. ________ (.' \) (.' -' ______
Received on Wednesday, 2 May 2001 19:52:31 GMT

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