- From: Jim Ley <jim@jibbering.com>
- Date: Thu, 4 Sep 2003 16:05:14 -0000
- To: <public-evangelist@w3.org>
"steph" <sniffles@unadorned.org> > The answer? You'll have to peek at: > http://www.webstandards.org/learn/askw3c/sep2003.html It's an interesting article, and many thanks to the W3 team guys for doing this, but it's a rather strange choice of question, as you've not answered "Why author XHTML?", which mime-type is indeed a problem for many, however until you've established why we want to author in a way which gives us "syntactic tricks which allows an XHTML document to be understood by most HTML browsers." I don't see the value of the question, to me HTML 4.01 allows us to be accessed by not _most HTML browsers_ but all. The article also says "using content negotiation ... you can actually serve your XHTML 1.0 as ..." which gives implicit support for this method, yet fails to mention the superior method of actually serving HTML as text/html under content negotiation. Translation from XHTML 1.0 to HTML 4.01 is a machine process, there is no sensible reason to do content-negotiation and serve the same document with different mime-types, the document should reflect this and recommend different documents for the different mime-types. Proper content-negotiation also allows you to use XHTML 1.1 rather than a strange subset of 1.0 that has difficult QA (are there any tools which can help with Appendix C conformance?). My question for the W3C is "Why author XHTML? and why serve XHTML as text/html ?" Jim.
Received on Thursday, 4 September 2003 12:13:00 UTC