Re: [minutes] CT Call 6 january 2009

Please pardon my jumping into an old thread, but this is funny, because 
the point I was making in my post one-week old post below just 
materialised in front of me on the W3C website:

http://www.w3.org/blog/BPWG/2009/01/05/best_practices_to_develop_mobile_web_app

here is what I am getting (Firefox):

XML Parsing Error: undefined entity
Location: 
http://www.w3.org/blog/BPWG/2009/01/05/best_practices_to_develop_mobile_web_app
Line Number 42, Column 518:            Comment from: pravin [Visitor] <a 
href="http://www.w3.org/blog/BPWG?disp=msgform&amp;comment_id=4005&amp;post_id=998&amp;redirect_to=http%3A%2F%2Fwww-mit.w3.org%2F2005%2F06%2Fblog%2FBPWGBlog.php%3Fblog%3D8%26title%3Dbest_practices_to_develop_mobile_web_app%26posts%3D3%26page%3D1%26more%3D1%26c%3D1%26pb%3D1%26disp%3Dsingle" 
title="Send email to comment author"><img 
src="http://www.w3.org/blog/rsc/icons/envelope.gif" width="13" 
height="10"  class="middle" title="Send email to comment author" 
alt="Email"/></a>  &middot; <a 
href="http://localhost/wurfl/wurfl_php.php" 
rel="nofollow">http://localhost/wurfl/wurfl_php.php</a>            </div>
----------------------------------------------------------------

It is honorable that W3C tries to eat its own dogfood, but, as I was 
saying, XHTML breaks way too easily to be viable for the big web. The 
risk that someone somewhere injects a poisonous entity into your site is 
just too high....

Luca

Luca Passani wrote:
>
> Tom Hume wrote:
>>
>>
>> On 7 Jan 2009, at 15:27, Luca Passani wrote:
>>
>>>>> >  sean: Sometimes there's content for high-end phones tagged as
>>>>> >  "mobile" that may not work on a low-end phone. We already have a
>>>>> >  method for keeping proxies away from content, "no-transform"
>>>> [snip]
>>>> Which bit of Seans comment do you disagree with here Luca?
>>> I disagree with the idea that who runs the network feels entitled to 
>>> know better than those who created the application and owns the 
>>> copyright. Can I?
>>
>> Course you can :) I don't see any assertion to the contrary in the 
>> comment from Sean that you quoted.
>
> Sean's comment reveals that Novarra feels entitled to reformat mobile 
> content to make it better (for their definition of better). I disagree 
> with that notion. What's your problem?
>
>>
>>> While I'm here, it still does not make sense that the XHTML MIME 
>>> type is not accepted as an indication that a site is mobile. This is 
>>> the situation with 99%+ of the content out there 
>>> (application/xml+xhtml == MOBILE), so there you have a perfectly 
>>> simple and effective way to detect mobile.
>>
>>
>> This is not universally true though - you and I discussed this back 
>> in March last year on my blog posting at
>>
>>     http://www.tomhume.org/2008/03/guidelines-for.html
>>
>> Where Russ Beattie popped up to point out that whilst this MIME type 
>> is a decent heuristic (and it's noted as such in CT), it's not absolute. 
>
> OK, so, since your ask for it, I will repeat all the arguments here 
> (and by the way, Russ wrote that comment when he was still trying to 
> make Mowser fly, so he was heavily biased at the time).
>
> The XHTML Mime type can be used  for web content only theoretically. 
> In practice nobody uses that MIME type for full-web content simply 
> because it would break way too easily on all browsers (save-as dialog 
> for MSIE users, catastrophic error messages and no content at all for 
> Firefox, Opera and Mozilla). Nobody uses XHTML for full web content, 
> not even those who think they are using XHTML (somewhere they'll be 
> doing something which will make all browsers reverse to quicks mode 
> and consider their xhtmllish mark-up as nothing more than tag-soup).
> Because of this, application/xml+xhtml is an excellent heuristics to 
> detect mobile content (the only place where the MIME type is adopted).
> Now, I can understand that W3C would find the idea of accepting that 
> MIME type as an indicator of mobile content embarassing (it could be 
> read as the admission that XHTML did not go very far on the web). On 
> the other hand, this is not my problem and it is simply not OK to 
> discard application/xml+xhtml  as a good heuristics for CTG because 
> the following holds in virtually all cases:
>
>     application/xml+xhtml  => mobile content
>
> Luca
>
>
>
>
>
>

Received on Tuesday, 13 January 2009 12:20:49 UTC