Re: Prevalence of ill-formed XHTML

On Sep 1, 2007, at 1:51 PM, Philip Taylor wrote:

>
> Robert Burns wrote:
>> On Sep 1, 2007, at 8:32 AM, Philip Taylor wrote:
>>> http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/guidelines.html doesn't say anything  
>>> about not using CDATA sections.
>> Yes it is true that appendix C does not say do not use CDATA  
>> sections, however, in best-practice circles that is how it is   
>> commonly interpreted. That is authors keep both scripts and  
>> stylesheets external and therefore have no reason to use CDATA  
>> sections.
>>> The checked, disabled, readonly, etc attributes can't be used at  
>>> all in a document that follows Appendix C's advice to work in old  
>>> UAs.
>> I'm not aware of any browsers that do not support unminimized  
>> boolean attributes. How widespread is that issue?
>
> If you don't actually follow Appendix C, and instead use some new  
> rules (like never using CDATA) and ignore some old irrelevant rules  
> (like boolean attributes) so that you're following an unwritten set  
> of guidelines to produce documents with XHTML markup that work as  
> text/html, then documents following that are going to work as text/ 
> html, by definition :-)

Sending content that is conforming to both the classic serialization  
and the XML serialization of HTML5 is possible, and likely works  
better than following Appendix C. Especially since there is no  
validator available that checks for Appendix C compliance. Sending  
HTML5 as text/html when it conforms to the XML serialization but not  
the classic serialization is likely to be a bad idea, and should not  
be allowed. I think that's what the spec is trying to get at.

Regards,
Maciej

Received on Sunday, 2 September 2007 01:58:53 UTC