Re: validator not doing application/xhtml+xml

Terje Bless <link@pobox.com> wrote:

> >What "substantive" information you are looking for?
> 
> A normative definition of what, exactly, can be expected to be the body of
> a MIME entity coming to us as application/xhtml+xml.

An important information for the validator is that the body of a MIME
entity sent as 'application/xhtml+xml' is syntactically XML.  That is,
the validator can switch to the "XML mode" without sniffing the actual
content.  That's a big difference with 'text/html'.

> # With respect to XHTML Modularization [XHTMLMOD] and the existence of
> # XHTML based languages (referred to as XHTML family members) that are
> # not XHTML 1.0 conformant languages, it is *possible* that
> # 'application/xhtml+xml' *may* be used to describe some of these
> # documents. However, it should suffice for now for the purposes of
> # interoperability that user agents accepting 'application/xhtml+xml'
> # content use the user agent conformance rules in [XHTML1].
> 
> [ Emphasis added. Those latter are the ill fated ³Appendix C² rules ]
> [ from XHTML 1.0.                                                   ]

There is an extensive discussion about media types on the Technical
Architecture Group [2], and there is a proposal to use a combination
of the Content-Type and Content-Features headers.  See related thread
on www-html [3] for details.

> # Although conformant 'application/xhtml+xml' interpreters can expect that
> # content received is well-formed XML (as defined in [XML]), it cannot be
> # guaranteed that the content is valid XHTML (as defined in [XHTML1]).

In the absense of a DOCTYPE declaration, the validator may only perform
well-formedness check, just like it does for XML documents sent as
'text/xml' or 'application/xml' at the moment.

[2] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/
[3] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-html/2002Feb/0053

Regards,
-- 
Masayasu Ishikawa / mimasa@w3.org
W3C - World Wide Web Consortium

Received on Tuesday, 12 February 2002 13:01:53 UTC