Namespace dispatching in XHTML, XML

Hey David,

On Thu, Jul 3, 2008 at 6:17 PM, L. David Baron <dbaron@dbaron.org> wrote:
>
> On Thursday 2008-07-03 17:23 -0400, John Kemp wrote:
>> Jamie Lokier wrote:
>>> Sam Ruby wrote:
>>>> http://feedvalidator.org/testcases/atom/1.1/brief-noerror.xml
>
>> The content-type is reported (via 'View Page Info') in my Firefox 2 as
>> application/xhtml+xml. However, the page is rendered as if it were an
>> ATOM feed (which usually has the content-type application/atom+xml IIRC)
>> rather than as if it were XHTML.
>
> That's because the MIME-type dispatch of the application/xhtml+xml
> type triggers XML processing by namespace-based dispatch.

Not if you're going by the spec!  I ensured that the old HTML WG
stayed well clear of that issue, which is why it isn't mentioned in
RFC 3236.  RFC 3023 also explicitly warns against assuming it.

Not that it's that big a deal, because there's definitely utility in
such an interpretation of a mixed namespace document.  There's just a
loss of flexibility and visibility (and therefore security) in using
embedded metadata like a namespace, rather than external metadata such
as a media type.

See also;

http://www.markbaker.ca/Talks/2004-media-types-and-compdocs/slide1-0.html
http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/mime-respect.html

Mark.
-- 
Mark Baker. Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA. http://www.markbaker.ca
Coactus; Web-inspired integration strategies http://www.coactus.com

Received on Thursday, 3 July 2008 22:58:56 UTC