Re: Understanding the "applicable specifications" clause (was: Re: Decentralised extensibility idea (ISSUE-41))

On Wed, Jan 20, 2010 at 1:59 PM, Leif Halvard Silli
<xn--mlform-iua@xn--mlform-iua.no> wrote:
> Tab Atkins Jr., Wed, 20 Jan 2010 12:26:30 -0600:
>> On Wed, Jan 20, 2010 at 11:10 AM, Leif Halvard Silli wrote:
>>> It at least purports to be XML. According to the pundits there is only
>>> two kinds of mark-up online - both of them stems from W3C: HTML and XML.
>>
>> I suspect you're referring to the recent comment I made,
>
> Interesting.

Seriously, there's no need for snark.

>> in which case
>> you definitely misunderstood what I meant.  I said that anything
>> served as text/html is HTML, and anything served as one of the XML
>> mimetypes is XML.  This was in reaction to a statement of yours that
>> there was somehow still some concept of "XHTML served as text/html".
>> There never was (it was always interpreted as a plain HTML page), and
>> HTML5 makes that explicit.
>
> Haiku.
>
> When did "XHTML served as text/html" disappear, then? The note about
> "XHTML Media Types" doesn't agree [1]. It is of course clear that
> text/HTML parsers treat anything one feeds them as text/HTML. (One
> exception: validator.nu.) But that is a different point.

I think that's precisely the point.  There never was any such thing as
"XHTML served as text/html".  It was always HTML through and through,
though some people were confused about this and believed they were
still in some essential way serving XHTML.  It was a (un?)lucky
coincidence that many of the differences between the HTML and XHTML
languages are ignored when the file is interpreted as HTML.  This led
to some unfortunate confusion when people continued to assume that
they were actually writing XHTML and used some features that were
*not* ignored by HTML, and in fact result in a noticeably different
DOM than what one would expect if it were interpreted as XHTML.

~TJ

Received on Wednesday, 20 January 2010 21:15:59 UTC