RE: Suggested revised text for HTML/XML report intro

Noah Mendelsohn et al.

I believe that the argument by Noah Mendelsohn is valid in principle and
that there is a consensus among us about the use of XHTML. However, it was
emphasized during our discussions that a solution that was specific to XHTML
was unacceptable for this project. The inclusion of a disclaimer should
ensure that the HTML/XML report document will not be misconstrued to be a
statement that precludes a solution based on the use of XHTML5 and XML.
Since we cannot assume that the readers of the HTML/XML report will have the
background or expertise to understand its limits, it is prudent to let them
know of these limits. If my sentence, "Since XHTML5 has not been completely
specified, no conclusion concerning interfacing it with XML can presently be
made."  is unacceptable, please modify it.  The reason for the use of
negatives is that, as far as I know, there is no official implementation of
XHTML5. Therefore we are speculating that if an official implementation of
XHTML5 becomes available, it will completely interface with XML. Since the
present HTML implementation is based on IDL, it cannot be assumed that an
XHTML5 implementation will be based on an XML schema. The creation of an
XHTML5 high-level specification need not result in the implementation of a
functioning XHTML5. Presently, I do not know of an official version of
XHTML5 that is available for test and that it would also have to permit
inclusion of a means to create an interleave element or its equivalent. 

If XHTML5 is eventually described by a full XML schema, then I would agree
that one should be able to import or include it into an XML schema and
import or include an XML schema into an XHTML5 schema. The closest that I
have seen is the MicrosoftR schema for HTML5 that is used with Expression
Web. I cannot make any statement about the long term utility or availability
of this schema because it appears to lack a copyright notice and I do not
know if it is or will be a valid description of XHTML5 or that it conforms
to the W3C or other responsible organization copyright rules.  As an
experimentalist, I would not claim that a problem has been solved without
carefully testing the result. 

Yours,

Robert (Bob) Leif

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Noah Mendelsohn [mailto:nrm@arcanedomain.com] 
Sent: Thursday, August 11, 2011 8:37 AM
To: rleif@rleif.com
Cc: public-html-xml@w3.org; 'Larry Masinter'; 'Norman Walsh'
Subject: Re: Suggested revised text for HTML/XML report intro

 

 

 

On 8/11/2011 11:00 AM, Robert Leif wrote:

> Since XHTML5 has not been completely specified, no conclusion 

> concerning interfacing it with XML can presently be made.

 

I would very much appreciate a clarification of the thinking behind this
request. The draft specification says [1]:

 

"The second concrete syntax is the XHTML syntax, which is an application of
XML. When a document is transmitted with an XML MIME type, such as
application/xhtml+xml, then it is treated as an XML document by Web
browsers, to be parsed by an XML processor. Authors are reminded that the
processing for XML and HTML differs; in particular, even minor syntax errors
will prevent a document labeled as XML from being rendered fully, whereas
they would be ignored in the HTML syntax. This specification defines version
5 of the XHTML syntax, known as "XHTML5"."

 

Though I haven't read the whole spec lately, I believe it goes on to specify
this "XHTML5", much in the same way as it does HTML5.  So, at the very
least, the specification as quoted above >does< draw some very important
conclusions about interfacing XHTML5 with XML.  It specifically says that
browsers (the most common user agents) will parse it with an XML processor.
That seems to me to go pretty far toward saying that XHTML5 documents are
indeed processable with XML tool chains.

 

Furthermore, the media type used is application/xhtml+xml, and the normative
specification for such media types makes clear that they are to be
processable as XML [2].

 

So, I'm having trouble with the premise of your request. Thank you.

 

Noah

 

[1]  <http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#html-vs-xhtml>
http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#html-vs-xhtml

[2]  <http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3023.txt>
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3023.txt