Re: Serving XHTML as XML

Hi Tina and all

Thanks for good feedback. Some of it has been dealt with in my
discussion with Gez (sorry if I offended you in the last mail, thanks
for the discussion, I have learned a lot from it), here are answers to
the most important issues of Tina. 

1)

Tina mentions the Q parameter used in some accept-headers. I'm not using
it in my testing at the moment. As far as I know, and I know almost
nothing about that subject, the q parameter is only needed when you set
up negotiation at the server directly. 

I log the accept-header of all browsers, other user agents, search
engines, web crawlers, etc. visiting my web pages. If problems appear, I
must fine tune my testing, and it could be necessary to start using the
Q parameter. If someone can convince me it is necessary, I will start
using it already today. But my pages seam to work well at the moment and
have done so with the present testing since Christmas.


2)

We have a CSS problem when XHTML is served with mime-type
application/xhtml+xml. E.g.: If you set the background-color for the
body element, Opera, Amaya and also Safari (I'm not sure for Safari, but
someone mentioned it at the CSS list) will show the viewport of the
browser with that background-color but not Mozilla Firefox. Here we see
white "padding" around the colored background.

In order for the background-color to fill out the whole wiewport in
Mozilla Firefox we also need to use the background-color property in the
html element (the top element). 

I have asked about the problem at the W3C CSS list a week ago, and the
people there told me that Mozilla Firefox is doing it right, and that
Opera, Amaya, Safari, also supporting application/xhtml+xml, are wrong.
Hickson, employed by Opera, even informed me, that Opera has
acknowledged it as a bug.

3)

JavaScript. You can not use document.write(), (yes it was bad anyway),
or other old JavaScript methods to add something to a webpage, hide or
change something. You must use the methods specified in W3C DOM.

Mark Pilgrim's article, The Road to XHTML 2.0: MIME Types
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2003/03/19/dive-into-xml.html
has more about JavaScript and XHTML served as XML.


4) 

I wrote in the first mail:

WCAG 11.1 says:

"Use W3C technologies when they are available and appropriate for a task
and use the latest versions when supported." [Priority 2]

Since is has been possible for several years to serve XHTML as XML to
browsers understanding it, I would say that one can't claim Conformance
Level "Double-A" if one is just using HTML.

----------

Please note that I write "just using HTML". Since it has been possible
for a long time to serve XHTML as XML to browsers like Opera, FireFox,
Safari, Amaya, etc, we should do that. Why not support the nice
standards compliant browsers taking us to the future of the Internet?

In my opinion that is what WCAG is saying both in letter and between the
letters, and that's what W3C is all about.


5)

Tina writes: "with a very few exceptions, XHTML does not provide any
advantages over HTML." This is probably true and the reason why I say
the following in my article:

"When serving XHTML with mime-type "application/xhtml+xml" the web page
must be well-formed. Just one violation of the markup rules of
well-formedness and the browsers will only show an error message. That
is the recipe of quality web pages based on modules of xml applications.
The "fond" of the recipe works today. Why not be ready to move fast,
when it becomes possible to harvest the benefits of XML in a not that
distant future?"

Note the expression: "The 'fond' of the recipe works today". The meat is
still missing but why not be prepared for it? Why not be ready to start
experimenting as soon as the browsers give us support for SVG, etc?

Best regards,
Jesper Tverskov

Received on Thursday, 24 February 2005 09:17:06 UTC