RE: xhtml implications

> From:	help kl [SMTP:klhelp@yahoo.com]
> 
> I just noticed that Amaya allows documents to be saved
> in html, text and xhtml. I believe xhtml is a
> reformulation of html4 in xml1.0. Does that make it a
> superset, subset or some strange variant of true-blue
> xml?
	[DJW:]  
	It's a use of XML in the same way as HTML (and 
	XML) are uses of SGML.  XML defines a framework,
	but you must actually define some elements before
	it becomes useful; the same for SGML.

> I'm interested in xml because of:
> - the separation of content and presentation
	[DJW:]  
	HTML was supposed to have minimal presentation implications
	and when the commercial browsers started violating this rule,
	quite seriously, CSS was developed to try and remove presentation.
	Ideally, HTML should have semantics but no guaranteed presentation.
	XHTML is the same.  XML and SGML don't even fully define the
	syntax, let alone the semantics and need DTDs (or XML schemas) to
	do this.

> - styling possibilities with css and the like
	[DJW:]  
	As pointed out above, you can do that with HTML on an ideal
	browser.  I'll leave it to the Amaya team to say what is 
	hard coded in Amaya.

> - dtd for creating my own document vocabularies, if
> needed
	[DJW:]  
	XHTML becomes a namespace.  I don't know how well Amaya supports
	general namespaces.  Again one for the development team.

> - agent-based processing of documents
	[DJW:]  
	Amaya has no scripting support.  I don't remember any
	mention of XSL.  Development team to confirm.  Obviously, what
	it produces can be manipulated by agents that do.

> - a large collection of public-domain and commercial
> xml tools for things like validation, transformation,
> agent-apis, etc, etc.
	[DJW:]  
	Amaya is one of these.

> Can someone please confirm that the above-listed xml
> benefits will indeed apply to Amaya generated xhtml
> documents?
> 
[DJW:]  By definition, pure XHTML documents cannot
include other namespaces.  I suspect, however that
Amaya can mix namespaces (it can certainly mix in MathML),
and therefore create multi-namespace documents, not just
XHTML namespace ones. 

Amaya cannot create badly formed documents.  I don't remember
the DTD support needed to prevent invalid ones.

Amaya is a test bed for CSS!

I'm not aware of any transformation tools in Amaya, but any
third party tools ought to work on what it produces.

I sense that you have been sold the benefits of XML without
actually really being told what XML is.
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Received on Wednesday, 10 January 2001 11:21:57 UTC