Fwd: XHTML Family Documents and Media Types

Sorry, I should have CCed the XHTML WG list when I sent this  
originally. Please CC www-validator on responses, thanks.

Begin forwarded message:

> Resent-From: www-validator@w3.org
> From: David Dorward <david@dorward.me.uk>
> Date: 17 March 2008 20:23:07 GMT
> To: www-validator@w3.org
> Subject: Re: XHTML Family Documents and Media Types
>
>
>
> On 17 Mar 2008, at 20:06, Mark Birbeck wrote:
>> 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.
>
> Transforming XHTML to HTML with XSLT is trivial. If the document  
> isn't being processed as XML, then what's the benefit of using  
> XHTML over HTML? It just means that HTML parsers are effectively  
> forbidden from implementing <foo /> according to HTML 4.01.
>
>> 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.
>
> Good reasons to either
>
> (a) Have good tools that won't let you produce pages with such  
> errors in them
>
> or
>
> (b) Use HTML
>
>> Of course, the HTML 5 route, of trying to recover from every error is
>> in my view, just as bizarre,
>
> If throwing an error message when the document is not well formed  
> is of no use to anyone, and recovering from every well formedness  
> error is bizarre, what does that leave?
>
>> 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.
>
> Works for me. I process various bits of data, some in a database,  
> some in static files, some from URIs on the web, process them with  
> XML tools and output various things - mostly HTML 4.01 Strict and  
> ATOM+XHTML.
>
>> That's what most of the world is doing, after all.
>
> Most of the world is throwing tag soup about with graphical HTML  
> generators and string substitution. XML tools aren't involved all  
> that often.

-- 
David Dorward
http://dorward.me.uk/
http://blog.dorward.me.uk/

Received on Monday, 17 March 2008 21:13:08 UTC