Comments on 22 July 2004 XHTML 2.0 draft

Hi there.  I've read the XHTML 2.0 draft of 22 July 2004 and
wanted to give the following feedback.  Most of the comments
are trivial typographic bugs, but there are a couple of
substantive ones.

-----------------------------------------

Section 7.1, the html version attribute

There already is an editorial comment that you need a definition
of version.  I'd like to add my opinion:

If you do specify a version, you need to specify what a user
agent should do if it sees an unknown version; just saying
"this spec is version 1.0" isn't sufficient.

If you don't specify how newer versions are handled then older
user agents will not treat newer xhtml versions in a consistent
way.

Finally, its not clear to me (as a first time reader) what purpose
version is meant to perform; the syntax is already represented
by the <!doctype>, so version must be intended for some other
(opaque in the current document) purpose.

-----------------------------------------

In section 9.2, the first example has a double closing quote:

     As <cite cite="http://www.example.com/books/the_two_towers"">

-----------------------------------------

In section 13.1, in the definition of hreftype, the embedded
example uses the attribute "type", not "hreftype" and "src" instead
of "href".  Perhaps a copy/paste issue?

     A user agent should imitate similar behavior when using other methods
     than HTTP. For instance, when accessing files in a local filestore,
     <p src="logo" type="image/png, image/jpeg"> might cause the user
     agent first to look for a file logo.png, and then for logo.jpg.

-----------------------------------------

Section 13.1, in the definition of access, there is a dangling
word "shortcuts" just below the example.

-----------------------------------------

In section 15.1 (bidi text) there are two
section definitions that are malformed:
     15.1.3.15.1.1. Inheritance of text direction information
and
     15.1.4. 15.1.2. The effect of style sheets on bidirectionality

-----------------------------------------

16.1 edit="moved" attribute

I can see the desire to be able to indicate the difference between
text that has been inserted or moved.  But the difference seems
pointless without being able to show where it was moved from; if
the viewer of the document is to intuit a difference between the
two then an indication of the source (before) the movement seems
important.  My 2 cents...

A second semantic suggestion for change sets: the other common
way to represent edits is with a version identifier instead
of datetime.  This more closely maps to how many versioning systems
work.

-----------------------------------------
  26.8, tr element

The example has a trailing "...the rest of the table...</tr>";
this seems inappropriate since the example is to show exactly
three rows.

Received on Saturday, 24 July 2004 05:37:02 UTC