XHTML+RDFa DTD UA support (Was: Getting the XHTML+RDFa default profile to be interesting)

Hi - yesterday, that Toby's Vocab draft was considered invalid by 
Firefox and Webkit, because a) Toby had used a named entity (—, 
if I remember) Opera took another approach: it simply did not process 
them - without issuing a warning (which is why Toby did not discover 
the problem.) It seems as if if both approaches are within what XML 1.0 
requires:

]] 
Note that non-validating processors are not obligated to read and 
process entity declarations occurring in parameter entities or in the 
external subset; for such documents, the rule that an entity must be 
declared is a well-formedness constraint only if standalone='yes'.
[[http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/REC-xml-20081126/#sec-references

Today, Toby has removed the named entity - and it works fine.

For most of the 11 XHTML doctypes that the W3 Validator offers 
validation from, the named entities of XHTML 1.0 and HTML 4.0 are 
supported. However, when  some of the newer doctypes, such as XHTML 
Basic 1.1 and XHTML+RDFa, then it seems as if the common web browsers 
do not support named entities.

This is probably because these browsers have not implemented support 
for these DTDs yet, and because they - probably - don't download DTDs 
they do not know. (I guess an error in the DTD is also an - unlikely - 
possibility.)

I think the RDFa working group should take such things into 
consideration - some options:

* If the browsers actually used out there are not supporting the 
XHTML+RDFa DTD, then it is perhaps smart to recommend to serve such 
documents with standalone="yes" - until there is such support.
* One should file bugs to make the browsers support these DTDs
* One possibly is to define DTDs which is more Polyglot Markup 
compatible
  http://www.w3.org/TR/html-polyglot/
  That is, to somehow offer DTDs without named entity support.

Toby Inkster, Sun, 15 Aug 2010 22:48:14 +0100:

> OK, here's a first stab at it:
> 
> http://buzzword.org.uk/2010/xhtml-vocab-20100815.xhtml
-- 
leif halvard silli

Received on Monday, 16 August 2010 12:23:26 UTC