Re: XHTML, Email, Data Objects and Metadata

On Wed, 12 Feb 2014 19:57:08 +0100, Joshua Cranmer <Pidgeot18@verizon.net>  
wrote:

> On 2/12/2014 9:16 AM, Adam wrote:
>> HTML for E-mail Community Group,
>>
>> Greetings.  In addition to agreeing that e-mail would be enhanced by  
>> mathematical and scientific notations, as >>discussed in Math in Email  
>> (http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-htmail/2014Feb/0033.html),  
>> I would like to >>recommend XHTML, instead of HTML, for e-mail.  XHTML  
>> is extensible, includes expressiveness for data >>objects, microformats  
>> and RDFa, facilitating features.
>
> It's not clear to me that XHTML can do anything that HTML can't do, at  
> least under HTML5.

I am pretty sure there *are* - most simply, it's possible to use custom  
XML vocabularies. And there are a lot of these around that people use. The  
ones I personally want most of all are to do with Music, and I know  
communities who would be very pleased to have XML for chemistry work  
better in mail. But as Joshua noted, attachments often meet the use cases  
people have for XHTML mail content.

In any event, I don't think XHTML vs HTML is the key question - for me it  
is more important to know how I can produce and consume content. I doubt  
any of my current mail software makes very nice XHTML.

Yandex mail produces well-formed XML, but that isn't the same. The HTML  
 from this client (Opera Mail) is as far as I know well below the standards  
I expect of an HTML editing tool (but then, that's my opinion of most HTML  
editing tools as well :( ).

I would welcome contributions about tools that support reading and or  
writing XHTML…

In principle I have nothing against XHTML and sometimes prefer it, but I  
think in practice we're likely to be stuck on HTML and we will be lucky if  
we can get good HTML. On the plus side, HTML5 would in principle allow us  
to include MathML and SVG, which are two things that I think could be  
really valuable.

Just my 2коп worth.

chaals

-- 
Charles McCathie Nevile - Consultant (web standards) CTO Office, Yandex
chaals@yandex-team.ru Find more at http://yandex.com