RE: why valid was Re: why XHTML

Well, I'm glad to see that my two innocent enough posts from yesterday
afternoon sparked such a constructive little debate...

Matt May wrote:

> But your thesis, that browsers do and should refuse to render XHTML 
> content if it's invalid, is itself invalid. Browsers simply don't do 
> this, and they never will. A "fatal error" in this context 
> merely means 
> it can't be parsed in standards mode, and a browser can claim to be a 
> Conforming User Agent by dropping from standards mode to quirks mode 
> when this happens, just like it does with HTML.

I can't remember the exact details, but I believe it was Opera 7 which
threw a "fatal error" in my face the other day when I was playing with
xhtml1.1 sent as application/xhtml+xml...so yes, it does happen.

However - as some others have already stated here - I believe that the
onus is on the page authors to create their pages and then, at the very
least, test them for well-formedness. But yes, as some people on this
list will surely point out to me right away, developers doing xhtml at
the moment are - for the most part - getting it wrong... well, call me
old fashioned, but I don't believe somebody should be doing something if
they don't have a clue about it in the first place.

Patrick
________________________________
Patrick H. Lauke
Webmaster / University of Salford
http://www.salford.ac.uk

Received on Thursday, 26 June 2003 05:09:31 UTC