RE: "fighting it out between WGs" (was: inline CSS)

Arjun Ray [mailto:aray@q2.net] wrote:
>On Tue, 22 Feb 2000, Chris Wilson wrote:
>>As far as I know,
>>there is no already-invested interest in allowing the inline style
>>attribute in XHTML 1.1+ in Microsoft content.
>
>Oh good.  Then you should have absolutely no trouble explaining this:
>
>  <TD align=left vAlign=top><!--[if gte vml 1]><v:rect id=_x0000_s1025
>  style="HEIGHT: 8.25pt; MARGIN-LEFT: 16.5pt; MARGIN-TOP: 3pt;
>  POSITION: absolute; WIDTH: 9pt; Z-INDEX: 1"
>  coordsize = "21600,21600" o:insetmode = "auto" filled = "f"...

Did I miss something here?  Did this document identify itself as XHTML 1.1?
Or are you just trying to confuse the issue at hand by bringing up Microsoft
Office content and attempting to get me to explain why they made every
decision they did?

As for that content - the "if gte vml" etc. bit is a conditional comment
syntax that Office came up with as the necessary (for them) solution to the
problem of different INSTALLED BASE browsers breaking on their content.
Their content is significantly dependent on various levels of standards
support, technologies like VML, etc.  They did not want Netscape Navigator
4.x, for example, to make their documents look bad simply because they
didn't support VML, or had incredibly bad CSS positioning support.

The <v:rect> is a VML element, referenced by a namespace declaration at the
top of the document and linked up to a behavior.  XML elements in HTML -
"sprinkles" - were discussed in a W3C-sponsored meeting titled "XML in HTML"
several years ago.  I believe a Note was released of the agreements therein.
The STYLE attribute on the <v:rect> tag is actually in that namespace, not
in XHTML - which was, incidentally, not even a 1.0 Recommendation at the
time Office 2000 shipped - and my original point still stands.  Even if you
consider the STYLE attribute to be in the HTML namespace, it is still HTML,
not XHTML 1.1.

-Chris

Received on Wednesday, 23 February 2000 11:44:16 UTC