RE: valid mark-up only priority 2!! WAS valid comments

> In general I think what Jukka says is true, but would like to
> disagree on a
> fairly small technical point. There is no reason not to publish
> your own DTD
> and validate to that. And the modularisation work done on XHTML showed how
> to include existing and widely-understood material such as the things in
> W3C's HTML recommendations. The upshot of this is that where you have a
> better DTD for accessibility you should use that - and this is the goal of
> the work on XML...

I think this is the difference between something that uses HTML and a HTML
document. Something that uses HTML may be a document defined by such a DTD,
an XML Schema that uses elements from the http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml
namespace in it's annotations, a XHTML + MathML + SVG as defined by
http://www.w3.org/TR/XHTMLplusMathMLplusSVG/ etc.

A HTML document is a more restricted matter; it is defined by a DTD (other
mechanisms could of course be used but it's worth noting that DTDs are good
at doing this kind of work, XML Schemas are better for describing the
allowed uses of elements regardless of the type of document they are used
in).

Implementation for the two is considerably different. It may be that the
strongly defined document type will see less and less use, especially if
browsers that support XForms, SVG, XLink and XInclude natively and mixed
with each other and with HTML come into wide use.

As such it makes sense that there is a standard for document types used as
well as standards for the meaning of the individual elements in the
http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml and later namespaces, and it makes sense to use
them.

Received on Tuesday, 12 November 2002 06:34:59 UTC