Re: Can the <body> tag be empty

ddcc@MIT.EDU wrote:

> I'm using XHTML 1.1. But my point is, in the DTD for
> PUBLIC "-//W3C//ELEMENTS XHTML Document Structure 1.0//EN"
> at http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-modularization/DTD/xhtml-struct-1.mod
> the body's content is given as <!ENTITY % body.content "( %Block.mix; )+" >
> meaning that the body cannot be empty (unless, I guess, you decide to make
> Block.mix empty), whereas the text documentation at
> http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-modularization/abstract_modules.html#s_structuremodule
> lists it as (Heading | Block | List)*, allowing the body to be empty. I was
> just wondering if the two should be made consistent.

OK, I see your point.  There's a wide variety of conbinations of
modules, and DTD cannot always adjust content models automatically -
you have to define a Document Model Module for each XHTML Family
document type.  To ease development of module-based XHTML document
types, we decided that while the abstract module definitions list
the "minimal" content models, DTD modules don't always use that 
"minimal" content model as a default, but use "common" content model
to by used by module-based XHTML, such as XHTML Basic and 1.1.
In this case, "( %Block.mix; )+" is the content model used by XHTML
Basic and 1.1.   If you include the Legacy Redeclarations Module [1],
The content model becomes "( #PCDATA | %Flow.mix; )*".

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-modularization/dtd_module_defs.html#a_module_Legacy_Redeclarations

Regards,
-- 
Masayasu Ishikawa / mimasa@w3.org
W3C - World Wide Web Consortium

Received on Monday, 14 January 2002 23:34:56 UTC