Re: RDFa and its relationship to XHTML

Hi Ben,

Le 06-06-08 à 23:42, Ben Adida a écrit :
> Glad to have you chime in on this, we really want to work more  
> closely with the validation team. One thing that's been surprising  
> - it was even mentioned to me by a few industry folks at WWW2006 -  
> why does the validator reject namespace declarations in XHTML?

I think there is often a misunderstanding about what is a validator.
	The validator doesn't reject anything,
	the validator implements the requirements of the specification: DTD  
or Schema.

The validator is also not a conformance checker, it's a markup  
validator, read here:
	- Read a document
	- Find its associated schema or DTD
	- Validate the document against its grammar.

Specifications sometimes declare things which are not possible to put  
in a schema or DTD.
	Example: you MUST have a meta name in HTML 4.01 to give the  
associated stylesheet language when only style attributes are used.

The markup validator doesn't implement some of the conformance  
requirements of specifications, sometimes because the specifications  
are too fuzzy, also because the resources are limited, but EVERYONE  
is welcome to PARTICIPATE to the code.
	Participate: -> http://www.w3.org/QA/Tools/qa-dev/


Answering your precise question.
> why does the validator reject namespace declarations in XHTML?

* Which version of XHTML: XHTML 1.0 or XHTML 1.1?
	Not the same specification, not the same requirements.

As for the XHTML 1.0 specification.

    XHTML 1.0 *strictly* conforming document:
	*Valid* document according to the DTD.

	[[[
	It must conform to the constraints expressed in one of
	the three DTDs found in DTDs and in Appendix B.
	]]]
	-- XHTML 1.0: The Extensible HyperText Markup Language (Second Edition)
	http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/#strict
	Thu, 01 Aug 2002 13:56:02 GMT
	
    XHTML 1.0 with other namespaces:
	*Well-formed* document
	http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/#well-formed

	[[[
	The XHTML namespace may be used with other XML
	namespaces as per [XMLNS], although such documents
	are not strictly conforming XHTML 1.0 documents as
	defined above. Work by W3C is addressing ways to
	specify conformance for documents involving multiple
	namespaces. For an example, see [XHTML+MathML].
	]]]

	-- XHTML 1.0: The Extensible HyperText Markup Language (Second Edition)
	http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/#strict
	Thu, 01 Aug 2002 13:56:02 GMT


So as I said,
	- namespaces are not valid BY design BY the specification.
	  if you want to change it, ask HTML WG
	- participation is more than welcome to improve the conformance
           checking part of the validator (following the specification.
	- validator doesn't make the specification, but follow the  
specification.


Best.

-- 
Karl Dubost - http://www.w3.org/People/karl/
W3C Conformance Manager, QA Activity Lead
   QA Weblog - http://www.w3.org/QA/
      *** Be Strict To Be Cool ***

Received on Thursday, 8 June 2006 23:56:35 UTC