- From: David Woolley <forums@david-woolley.me.uk>
- Date: Fri, 18 Apr 2008 08:56:48 +0100
- To: William F Hammond <hammond@csc.albany.edu>
- CC: whatwg@whatwg.org, public-html@w3.org, www-math@w3.org, www-svg@w3.org
William F Hammond wrote: > > Whether there is one mimetype or two, erroneous content will need > handling. The experiment begun around 2001 of "punishing" bad > documents in application/xhtml+xml seems to have led to that mime type > not being much used. The purpose was not to punish, but to ensure that documents in mixed namespaces could be parsed by user agents that didn't understand all the namespaces. In fact, one of the common bogus reasons for using sort of XML syntax under www/html is based on the mistaken belief that it ensures documents do have a correct syntax (part of this was the false belief that HTML optional closing tags were tolerated syntax errors, when the tags are actually inferred by the parser in a deterministic way). The reason that people don't serve as application/xhtml+xml is the existence of legacy browsers, particularly IE, in the field. However those legacy browsers don't handle SVG or MathML, so that is not a relevant consideration here. As far as I can see, the only people who would really suffer from requiring XML syntax for mixed HTML/SVG would be cut and paste coders of web applications. I think that might be a reasonable penalty for dubious copyright practices. People with static content should be able use some form of authoring tool to do most of the work of creating an HTML parse tree then serialising it as well formed XML (if not valid XHTML), and possibly even fixing up small CSS anomalies. I'm only on www-svg, other lists may fail or be delayed. (If cross posting is to become the standard, could I suggest the list server be modified to: 1) allow posting to all w3c groups if one is subscribed to one; 2) reject outright, on all lists, if there is a mix of public and closed lists. 3) whatwg and w3c should come to some agreement that allows posters to one to post to the other.) -- David Woolley Emails are not formal business letters, whatever businesses may want. RFC1855 says there should be an address here, but, in a world of spam, that is no longer good advice, as archive address hiding may not work.
Received on Friday, 18 April 2008 07:59:49 UTC