Re: Indicating browser support for XHTML1.0

"Chris Haynes" <chris@harvington.org.uk> wrote:

> The 'text/html' type does not help with version numbers, nor does the
> new mime type.

Actually RFC 1866 defined an optional parameter "level" for
"text/html" [1], and (never-standardized) HTML 3.0 proposed
the "version" parameter [2].  However, in practice those
parameters were never used and dropped in RFC 2854 [3].

> Is 'application/xhtml+xml' intended to provide this distinction,

The "profile" optional parameter is intended to provide
a *short-term* solution to negotiate for a variety of XHTML-
based languages.

> or is
> there anything else in the W3C recommendations which would serve this
> purpose?
> 
> Has there been any consideration given to indicating agent capability
> at the major/minor version level?

CC/PP (Composite Capabilities/Preference Profiles) [4] is
designed to describe user agent capabilities and preferences.
Examples in the spec include a profile component
"htmlVersionsSupported" to indicate versions of (X)HTML supported
by a user agent.  WAP User Agent Profile (UAProf) specification [5]
is based on CC/PP and it defines "HtmlVersion" for that purpose.

[1] http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/html-spec/html-spec_4#SEC4.1
[2] http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/html3/HTMLandMIME
[3] http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2854.txt
[4] http://www.w3.org/TR/CCPP-struct-vocab/
[5] Available from: http://www.wapforum.org/what/technical.htm

Regards,
-- 
Masayasu Ishikawa / mimasa@w3.org
W3C - World Wide Web Consortium

Received on Thursday, 22 November 2001 00:56:41 UTC