Re: Valid XML

Patrick Lauke:
>> Jim Ley
>> indeed I cannot think of a user agent that
>> supports XHTML
>> 1.0 that does not also support XHTML 1.1.
>How about Internet Explorer? XHTML 1.1 *should not* be sent
>with a text/html mime type.
>http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-media-types/#summary
>If you send it as application/xhtml+xml IE prompts you to
>download the page or open it in another program.

Not mine, it hands it off to an XHTML 1.1 user agent, but that's 
irrelevant - the issue is that I do not believe that IE is an XHTML 1.0 user 
agent, I can find no such claims by the creators that it is one, and It does 
not render trivial XHTML 1.0 documents, for example it can't even render 
this:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" 
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en">
<script src="thing.src" type="text/javascript"/>
<title>Chickens!</title>
<body>
<h1>Chickens</h1>
</body>
</html>

>If you send XHTML 1.1 as text/html nonetheless (via content
>negotiation on the server, sending text/html when browsers don't
>support application/xhtmlxml), you're effectively
>going against the spec,

No, effectively, you _are_ going against the specification, we can't pick 
and choose which standards to evangelise.

As to "compatible" XHTML, I use inline style sheets too often for that, and 
I can't do that with Appendix C. (C.1 and C.14 cannot both be fulfilled) as 
well as the fact that I can no longer use any XML tools to generate the 
content, and I'm relying on undefined error handling in user agents.  I can 
have no confidence that future user agents won't recover from those errors 
in a similar way.

>Also...the strength of XHTML lies in the ability it gives
>developer to mix other technologies (such as MathML) into the
>same document and to do things like extending the spec with your
>own DTDs.

This would not be possible with "compatible" XHTML 1.0 though anyway, so 
what's the point if the only power is something that not even anyone here 
feels they can use?

Jim.

Received on Friday, 20 May 2005 08:37:05 UTC