Re: validator.w3.org and XHTML

Shane McCarron wrote:
> There has been some debate about this.  In the current (not yet 
> uploaded) draft this is not prohibited.
yay! :)
>   I think that there is value in telling people about use that would 
> potentially cause portability issues.  It is not clear to me how to do 
> this in a way that does not give more weight to these guidelines than 
> they deserve though.  The Guidelines are just that.  You do not need 
> to follow them.  In theory, only people who are writing XHTML that is 
> to be delivered as text/html to legacy user agents need worry about 
> these.  In reality, that is everyone who is writing XHTML for web, 
> since the web has IE, and IE doesn't support XHTML.
Maybe IE9 will be the browser that makes real XHTML on the WWW practical.
> It's not that we don't appreciate the problem - we do.  We just don't 
> know how to give some people good advice without giving others bad 
> advice - in particular when we don't know what problem they are trying 
> to solve.  Perhaps if the validator had an /option/ that turned on/off 
> this mode, then the user could decide what they cared about?
I would expect any HTML compatibility testing alerts to be issued as 
warnings (not errors), and only if the document was served as text/html 
(perhaps with a "This document did not pass HTML compatibility testing, 
which might be an issue if you serve it as text/html. You may wish to 
<a>see the results of HTML compatibility testing</a>." for 
application/xhtml+xml documents).
>> OK, got confused by “W3C Note 26 November 2008”. You might want to 
>> s/Note/Editor's DRAFT/ or something.
> Hmm - I will look at that.  Note that we had intended to publish on 1 
> December, but then some helpful person (thanks David) sent in a bunch 
> of comments that we are still integrating.
Sorry about the lateness - I got distracted by a sudden need to find a 
new job :)


-- 
David Dorward
http://dorward.me.uk/

Received on Monday, 8 December 2008 16:20:24 UTC