WD-xhtml2-20021211: Comments on Examples Used

Here are some of my thoughts on the sample code used throughout the
present XHTML 2.0 working draft:

  1) Legacy media (MIME) types and file extensions.  Code examples have
     quite a lot of references to files with '.html' extensions, plus
     there's an occasional mention of the "text/html" media type.

     E.g. 11.1.3 has an example reading:

       <head>
       <title>Reference manual -- Page 5</title>
       <link rel="Start" title="The first page of the manual"
             type="text/html"
             href="http://example.com/manual/start.html"/>
       </head>

     Personally I think no references to the legacy HTML media type
     should be made in this way; '.xhtml' and "application/xhtml+xml"
     should be used instead.

     (In practice, all web servers associate '.html' with "text/html",
     and recent versions of Apache 2, thttpd, etc. associate '.xht' and
     '.xhtml' with "application/xhtml+xml".  This will probably cause
     confusion for a lot of web authors in the future, and the more that
     can be done to address that now, the better.  Of course, I realise
     no firm decision has been made in public as to whether XHTML 2 will
     use the "application/xhtml+xml" media type, whether it will use a
     special profile to identify itself, etc.)

  2) Line breaks within attribute values.  I was always lead to believe
     that this was bad practice, but the 'summary' attribute in 18.7
     does this.  Any thoughts?

  3) 18.3.4. Sample table.  The text example appears to have a
     superfluous '=' on the bottom row.

  4) The example of the 'meta' element in 12.1.1 has comments that start
     with "<--" instead of "<!--".

  5) People and organisations in examples.  Some examples appear to
     refer to real people (Jakob Nielsen, J.R.R. Tolkien, Steven
     Pemberton) whilst others seem to refer to fictional people (John
     Doe).  Whilst not a major point, could it be made more consistent?

Thanks,

Dave

Received on Sunday, 15 December 2002 09:24:51 UTC