- From: Mark Birbeck <mark.birbeck@x-port.net>
- Date: Mon, 17 Mar 2008 20:06:15 +0000
- To: "olivier Thereaux" <ot@w3.org>
- Cc: "Shane McCarron" <shane@aptest.com>, "XHTML WG" <public-xhtml2@w3.org>, "W3C Validator Community" <www-validator@w3.org>
Hi Olivier, > If I may add my personal opinion, I think this may be a mistake. > Overloading the text/html for XHTML 1.0 was already not a good idea > IMHO, but at least it had the HTML compatibility guidelines. Wouldn't > it be possible to work with Microsoft to make IE support XHTML media > type, instead of overloading text/html even further with a whole > family of XML languages, and jeopardizing extensibility in the process? Personally I see it as the other way around; it was a mistake to suggest that the MIME type and the document itself are inseparable. What has such an approach gained us over the years? Certainly not extensibility. XHTML 1.0 was incredibly important for HTML because it told people how to generate XML documents that could be rendered in web browsers. In other words, the world of XML tools could be used to generate documents, and yet those documents could still be read in standard browsers. But why insist that browsers must interpret those documents as XML? For example, sending a non-well formed XHTML document to Firefox means you get a blank page with lots of hyphens and a caret...what use is that to anyone? And worse, it goes against the whole history of HTML, where attempts are made to render documents that have errors in. Of course, the HTML 5 route, of trying to recover from every error is in my view, just as bizarre, but that doesn't really matter. The key point is that there should be nothing wrong with creating a document using XML tools, and then delivering that document to an HTML rendering engine and seeing something useful. That's what most of the world is doing, after all. Regards, Mark -- Mark Birbeck mark.birbeck@x-port.net | +44 (0) 20 7689 9232 http://www.x-port.net | http://internet-apps.blogspot.com x-port.net Ltd. is registered in England and Wales, number 03730711 The registered office is at: 2nd Floor Titchfield House 69-85 Tabernacle Street London EC2A 4RR
Received on Monday, 17 March 2008 20:06:55 UTC