XHTML 2.0 - 3.2 Conformance Requirements

Hi,

What does the first criteria mean?

| The user agent must parse and evaluate an XHTML 2 document for
| well-formedness. If the user agent claims to be a validating user 
| agent, it must also validate documents against a referenced 
| schema according to [XML]. 

It doesn't say anything about what should happen if the UA finds a WF
or schema violation.  What should happen?

The 7th criteria, if standalone="yes" was set, this would be a WFness
error, does this criteria describe error recovery, or is this
behaviour only for non-standalone XML documents where the entity may
have been set in the external subset?

10.  Why MUST user agents use a particular visual representation if
they do not support CSS, and why is this restriction only on visual
presentation, (there are aural CSS settings in the default
stylesheet.)

I don't see the need on placing any restriction on what a conforming
UA may do - I certainly do not agree with making a UA non-conforming
purely because it doesn't implement CSS and allows users to pick their
own colours for links!  (I realise that 10 only says SHOULD, but the
introduction to 3.2 says MUST.)  In any case I don't even agree that
this is a SHOULD for a conforming UA.

Does the Fragment identifier constraint mean that with mixed namespace
content, I cannot use the fragment identifiers of the other namespaces
in an XHTML document to identify part of an SVG image say?

Is processing children of unknown elements sensible - this is what led
to the script cargo-cult of <!-- hide from old browsers gobbledygook.

Also what happens with a mixed namespace document where you have an
SVG fragment with embedded XHTML2 inside a foreignObject, in what
situations should the XHTML portions be rendered - does the combined
document really make "sense" without the SVG elements, or will this be
simply forcing authors to go to extreme lengths to ensure their
documents degrade.  I feel the exact opposite of the above conformance
requirement would make more sense.

Cheers,

Jim.

Received on Friday, 23 July 2004 20:50:38 UTC