Re: [XML] well-formedness & validation / section 4.2.8.1

> I add that a "SHOULD" statement is already strong, 
> especially since we will require conformant deployments
> to justify the reasons for not  following a SHOULD
> statement.

Two comments on this:
a) This fails to address point (3) in my message. Once one has found a justification to escape the validation clause, there is not even a minimum guarantee of well-formedness.
b) According to the reasoning, this is actually a justification to eliminate entirely the reference on validation. I do not quite see why one would impose a supposedly strong requirement on validation, while at the same time arguing that well-formedness, which is formally much weaker than validation, is too strong... There is an inherent contradiction here.

> Mandating well-formedness is pretty cool, but I suspect 
> well-formed content is still the exception to the rule on 
> the Web, especially with  legacy Web sites (I 
> understand that the mobile Web is by far "cleaner" in 
> that respect than the old desktop one, but that is not the
> point here).

The point is as follows: insofar as the intent is to make legacy, non necessarily valid or well-formed desktop content available to mobile devices, one has to consider the target formats these support:
a) XHTML mobile profile: XML dialect, requires well-formedness.
b) XHTML basic: XML dialect, requires well-formedness.
c) WML: XML dialect, requires well-formedness.
d) HTML: does not a formal definition of well-formedness, only of validation.

Conclusion: either one must enforce well-formedness, or one cannot because the concept does not exist.

> What we could say is "When the initial content is well-
> formed, the altered content MUST be well-formed".

The assumption is that the CT-proxy will modify the input content "in-place" and not convert it to another format -- which I suspect actually represents the majority of the cases (see above).

E.Casais

Received on Monday, 1 December 2008 12:17:33 UTC