Re: The Return of "WaSP Asks the W3C"

"ed nixon" <ed.nixon@LynnParkPlace.org>
>Dominique Hazaël-Massieux wrote:
>> Le ven 05/09/2003 à 06:06, Bjoern Hoehrmann a écrit :
><snip/>
>> (FWIW, I'm not really sure this technical/theoretical discussion belongs
>> to public-evangelist@w3.org, it would probably be more appropriate in
>> www-html or www-qa for the conformance topics)
>
>A discussion such as this -- although likely more well
>informed than most -- pre-figures the kind bush-whacking talk that takes
>place in meetings where evangelists dip their toes (and often withdraw
>quickly, scalded.)

If an evangelist can't answer the question, "why are you recommending using
XHTML? I heard it's fraught with problems, about mime-types, encodings etc."
then they're likely to be discredited all around, it may not be the right
place for the discussion, but it is likely that an evangelist is going to
come with people like me, who's seen evangelism discredit XHTML repeatedly
(for example many sites are sending out XHTML as app/xhtml when the user
agent specifically announces they do not understand it, and that's down to
them evangelising content negotiation but failing to actually understand how
to do it.)

So if the suggestion is that evangelising XHTML is a "good thing", then
people need to be able to address the issues me and Bjoern have, this isn't
the place to work out an answer to the question, but if these problems are
solved (and we shouldn't be even considering evangelising them until they
are) then we should be able to be pointed to the previous discussion and
conclusions, there should be no need to discuss these things.

>My take away from this discussion so far is the HTML 4.xx Strict is the
>most viable place in which to invest evangelical effort.

HTML 4.01 strict for HTML user agents absolutely, there's no advantage that
I've seen for sending XHTML as text/html, when real world mixed namespace
user agents exist then we can start looking at XHTML+etc.  but even then I
feel we're missing a solution for server negotiation of what namespaces a
user agent will support (there's no point sending XHTML+MathML, to a UA that
groks XHTML+SVG+FOOL etc.)

Jim.

Received on Friday, 5 September 2003 09:30:07 UTC