Re: XHTML and MIME

On Sep 1, 2006, at 21:36, John Boyer wrote:

> XHTML served as text/html are not treated as XML because your  
> current code makes no effort to attempt that first.  In my earliest  
> posts on this subject, I said that an application should lead with  
> the attempt to parse XML, then follow with recovery strategies, or  
> that it could try HTML first until it found "new features" then  
> switch to an attempt to use XML.

What would you do with running scripts when you decide to halt the  
parser and reparse with another one?

> The explanation for why not to do it this way has so far been "Cuz  
> we don't wanna!'

No, the explanation is that the HTML WG said that browsers shouldn't  
do such things.

> The goal here is not to try to optimize the error cases to the  
> point of perfection.

Real-world browsers need to interoperate even in the error cases.  
Saying that apps do what they please after a well-formedness error is  
not good enough.

> Moreover, with the appendix C guidelines for XHTML combined with  
> making the important ease-of-authoring changes to XForms that *are*  
> what we need to harvest from WF2

If XForms is "harvesting" stuff from WF2, what's in it for WF2?

> Elliote Harold: In a typical browser, yes. However I routinely  
> download such pages with non-browser-tools based on XML parsers;  
> and there the results are quite different. In these contexts, the  
> XML-nature of these pages is very useful to me.
>
> JB: +1, precisely my point about being able to grow the web over  
> time in new and interesting ways. The enticement to XML well- 
> formedness helps bring about new capabilities.

But above you were advocating automatic error recovery, which in  
practice would mean that well-formedness is thrown out of the window!  
So if well-formedness is really a precondition for growing the web  
over time in new and interesting ways, what you suggested above would  
defeat it.

(BTW, when I download text/html in my own non-browser apps, I use an  
HTML parser that emits SAX events as if parsing XHTML.)

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/

Received on Saturday, 2 September 2006 08:30:18 UTC