Re: why valid was Re: why XHTML

On Wednesday, June 25, 2003, at 02:54 PM, Matt May wrote:
> When content is designed to a standard, the user agent is obligated to 
> adhere to that standard when rendering it (and most if not all now do 
> this). But poorly-designed content doesn't give you that kind of 
> contract. A problem, once the content is published, would harm the 
> user, and thus has to be handled by the user agent. The _fault_, 
> however, belongs to the author and/or his or her authoring tool.

XHTML browsers, which encounter a document claiming to be XHTML but
which is not well-formed, _are_ obligated to throw fatal errors by
the XML specification.

>>   If so, any other parts we should have fun with ignoring whilst we're
>>   at it ?
>
> Ha ha.

Matt, do you agree that a user agent parsing an XHTML document which
encounters style rules within <!-- comments --> in the <style> element
should completely ignore those style rules?

That is what the XHTML and XML specifications demand, but it is clearly
not backwards compatible, or standard practice.  Should the browser
conform with the spec, or should it ignore it here again too?

--Kynn

> --
Kynn Bartlett <kynn@idyllmtn.com>                     http://kynn.com
Chief Technologist, Idyll Mountain                http://idyllmtn.com
Author, CSS in 24 Hours                       http://cssin24hours.com
Inland Anti-Empire Blog                      http://blog.kynn.com/iae
Shock & Awe Blog                           http://blog.kynn.com/shock

Received on Wednesday, 25 June 2003 18:05:58 UTC