Re: XHTML Invalidity / WML2 / New XHTML 1.1 Attribute

On 8/12/00 at 11:50 AM Dan Connolly wrote:
{Please refer to the following letter}

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-html/2000Aug/0047.html

Thank You Mr. Connolly for answering my letter.

>Always? You would disagree that mixing, say, XHTML with
>MathML is a good idea?

In this example I believe we do have a common vocabulary,
this being XML.  I agree there are many things we would 
still have to agree upon however the basics are at least
there.

I would also like to point out that neither myself nor Bertilo Wennergren
agreeded to any vocabulary.  In fact his comment was ...

"All we need is a validator that allows for mixing of vocabularies."

To which I agree in part so long as the markup for each vocabulary
is clearly defined as to when each vocabulary would begin and end.
Such as my poor example. Which by the way I would never ever
code in such a manner at any point in time.  It was just a example
and nothing more. If we are going to mix vocabularies then I would
like to see a form similar to how we mix Java and HTML.  Each
all though can be mixed is clearly defined and can be separated as 
needed with few modifications to the orginial code.

Namespaces <cringe>.  Namespaces are probably the most talked about
and least understood of all the XML specifications.  I am going to bail out
on this one as just when I think I understand what a namespace is and how
it is suppose to function someone comes along and proves to me how little
I truly know about the subject.  I use them with much trepidation and concern.
Based upon what I have been reading in all of W3C forums it seems I am not the 
only one either. Let's not get into a discussion about namespaces.  I will simply
use what I know works and works well.  Easier for me and less bandwidth for you.

>I agree that using DTDs to deal with mixed vocabularies
>is awkward, at best.

>But XML Schemas are designed to handle it cleanly, and
>in my experience, they do.
>	http://www.w3.org/XML/Schema

Mr. Connolly I really like XML Schema's.  After 2 months struggling
with DTD's and still making little or no head way XML Schema's is
for me certainly the better option.  In just a little over 2 weeks I was
able to code a XML Schema of my own design and have it work 
correctly.  However Schema are not a recommendation as yet.
And I still am not sure what level of support I can expect from
browser vendor's or worse yet when.  But I think we both agree
the future holds great promise.  [side note - to help my understanding
of DTD's I have joined a XHTML user group to which we are building
a FAQ module which is DTD reliant, however since DTD's are going
to become at least in general absolute I must question the value of 
even bothering to learn the process.]


My concern like many others here is XML Schema support
in relation to XHTML. To which is confusing at best and nearly
impossible to truly implement on a professional basis.  Some
reassurance by W3C in this area would be very welcome by 
some of us. Since XHTML module's rely upon DTD's for the most
part I would be curious to hear what your ideas and opinions 
about this subject are.


>That's easier said than done... the rules for "ignoring"
>tend to be quite tricky to deploy in an interoperable fashion.

Not sure I understand why this would be such a problem.  Older
browsers ignore Javascript markup via <!-- {ok so that is more a
hack than a actual implantation, but it does work} There must be
something here that I must learn., but it seems to me that a parser
would ignore any content not found outside of it's framework.

For example a HTML parser would ignore anything in between
<smgl></smgl> or <xml></xml> but then again it might not and
attempt to display these as standard text.  Depends on the parser.
I will agree that backwards compatibility might be a strong reason
why you don't want a validator/parser to simply ignore markup for 
another vocabulary.

Cavre

Received on Tuesday, 15 August 2000 06:23:17 UTC