Re: Verbosity of XHTML 2 (was Re: XHTML 2.0 and Xlinks (again))

The following text was discovered Sunday 11 August 2002 in a note
attributed to one "Christian Wolfgang Hujer <Christian.Hujer@itcqis.com>":

> Why not simply require XHTML 2.0 user agents to be validating?

I personally *really* like this; it appeals to my pedantic nature. IMO This
Is The Way It Should Always Have Been. :)

> Validation should not be a traffic problem since fetching the DTD is not
> required if a user agent has a catalog mapping the public identifiers (of
> the files that make up the external subset of the XHTML 2.0 document type
> definition) to its own copy of the entity.
> 
> <some snippage occurs here>
> 
> So user agents could be required by XHTML 2.0 to include the external
> subset or schema, for traffic reduction. Of course someone might ask what
> must happen with updates to the external subset or schema.

....or, the user agent could simply grab the DTD or schema and cache it.

> And hey, we don't need character entities anymore since even vi improved
> is Unicode / UTF-8 capable and has no problems with chinese characters or
> even rtl writing ;-)

True, but that doesn't address, say, &lt; and &gt;.

> > <biiiiiiig example of document structure snipped> 
> I wouldn't mind. I'm not deep enough into Schema so I can't tell if Schema
> would reduce the namespace declarations. But anyway, there's copy/paste
> and there's good editors.

The problem is that there's people who blanch already at including the
doctype in HTML 4.x. Requiring all that is almost certainly going to inspire
folks to stick with older versions, which would be a Bad Thing.

And not yet everyone is wise enough to See The Light and just use Vim. :)


-- 
Joanne Hunter <http://menagerie.tf/~jrhunter/>  Say No to HTML Mail!/"\
 Of course, I don't know how interesting any of this really is,     \ /
 but now you've got it in your brain cells so you're stuck with it.  X
      --Gary Larson                            ASCII Ribbon Campaign/ \

Received on Sunday, 11 August 2002 22:17:12 UTC