- From: Ian Graham <igraham@smaug.java.utoronto.ca>
- Date: Fri, 15 Sep 2000 18:42:56 -0400
- To: Dan Connolly <connolly@w3.org>
- cc: Steven Pemberton <steven.pemberton@cwi.nl>, "L. David Baron" <dbaron@fas.harvard.edu>, www-html@w3.org
On Wed, 13 Sep 2000, Dan Connolly wrote: > > There should be no > > sniffing of text/html documents to see if they are really XHTML. > > I don't know what you mean by "sniffing"; it is a simple > computation to distinguish conforming XHTML documents > from conforming HTML 4.01, HTML 4.0, HTML 3.2, and HTML 2.0 > documents: the latter begin with doctype declarations with > well-known FPIs and URIs, e.g.: > > <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" > "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd"> > <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" > "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd"> I believe that this is exactly what they mean by sniffing -- read the start of the incoming text/html data and use the data there to determine whether it is 'really' HTML (or rather the mess of tags that people generally call HTML) or XML (XHTML), and the pass the data on acordingly. I tend to think that such sniffing, even if it works, is more confusing to developers than helpful, since it is just one more way for things to go wrong in a hard to detect way. Ian -- Ian Graham ................................... ian.graham@utoronto.ca ......................................... http://www.utoronto.ca/ian/
Received on Friday, 15 September 2000 18:43:06 UTC