RE: Proposals for section 2.2

Hi Martin,

Thanks for putting some thought into this.  I also think your approach
of suggesting the techniques before working on the detail is a very good
one.

Unfortunately, I disagree with your proposal in a couple of areas.  I'll
make notes below, then suggest an alternative.

My understanding is that we currently have the possibility of covering
pages served in a number of ways:
	HTML
	XHTML 1.0 served as HTML (ie. text/html)
	XHTML 1.0 served as XML (ie. application/xhtml+xml,
application/xml, or text/xml)
	XHTML 1.1

I think in Montreal you and I agreed that in the guidelines we should
define 'xhtml 1.0 served as xml' to be 'served as application/xhtml+xml'
only for the purposes of the guidelines, which narrows the field a
little.

I have to admit that I still have an open question in my mind as to
whether we should write guidelines about xhtml served as xml at all,
since IE with its vast market share only displays it as code.  (That
will be the subject of another email.)

I think the usage scenarios we are recommending for charset declaration
are:

HTML
	HTTP 		yes
	xml decl	no
	meta		yes

XHTML 1.0 as text/html
	HTTP		yes
	xml decl	yes, if used
	meta		yes

XHTML as xml (1.0 and 1.1)
	HTTP		yes
	xml decl	yes
	meta		no


I think these are equally applicable whether you use standards mode or
not, and whether or not you use transitional or strict approaches (where
relevant).


My concern with the techniques you are proposing is that the new points,
and to some extent the second point, are (albeit good advice) not
specifically relevant to internationalization.  I would prefer to have
just the following techniques:

A] Where practical, declare the page's character encoding by setting the
charset parameter in the HTTP Content-Type header. (same as we currently
have)

B] If you use the XML declaration in XHTML documents, then always use
the encoding attribute. (changed from your suggestion)

C] Use the meta element to explicitly declare the document's character
encoding for HTML documents and XHTML documents served as text/html.
(same as you suggested)


However, I think that the new points you included are well worth saying,
but as notes rather than separate techniques - in fact, I think you have
to mention these things as part of the explanation of the techniques
mentioned above anyway.  I don't think there's any difference in impact
for later revision of the document as technology moves on.



RI

============
Richard Ishida
W3C

contact info: http://www.w3.org/People/Ishida/ 

http://www.w3.org/International/ 
http://www.w3.org/International/geo/ 

See the W3C Internationalization FAQ page
http://www.w3.org/International/questions.html



> -----Original Message-----
> From: public-i18n-geo-request@w3.org 
> [mailto:public-i18n-geo-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Martin Duerst
> Sent: 17 September 2003 19:41
> To: public-i18n-geo@w3.org
> Subject: Proposals for section 2.2
> 
> 
> 
> Here is my (updated, after discussions last week) proposal
> for some of the items in section 2.2:
> 
> second point: change to
> 
>     Where practical, use the XML declaration to declare the 
> character encoding
>     of XHTML documents.
> 
> third point: change to
> 
>     Use the meta element to explicitly declare the document's 
> character 
> encoding
>     for HTML documents and XHTML documents served as text/html.
> 
> 
> new point:
> 
>     For XHMTL document served as text/html, do not use the 
> XML declaration
>     if you need the document to be processed in 'standards' mode.
> 
> 
> new point:
> 
>     Never use the presence of an XML declaration as the means 
> to trigger
>     'quirks mode' on browsers with backwards-compatibility features.
> 
> 
> The reason for structuring the points this way is that this 
> will allow us to remove the later points once we do no longer 
> consider IE 5/6 widespread, and we can also concentrate the 
> explanations about this issue.
> 
> If this is okay for you as a general direction, I'll work on 
> some more details.
> 
> 
> Regards,     Martin.
>

Received on Monday, 22 September 2003 09:28:41 UTC