Re: Is this legal XHTML 1.1?

Hi Ian, Hi Elliotte, dear list members,

Am Montag, 9. Dezember 2002 06:12 schrieb Ian Hickson:
> On Sun, 8 Dec 2002, Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote:
> > At 3:43 AM +0000 12/9/02, Ian Hickson wrote:
> >> In any case, it is illegal to send XHTML 1.1 as text/html, so the whole
> >> excercise is pointless as no legacy browser would be able to render the
> >> page in the first place.
> >
> > Where exactly does it say that?
>
> It says it in the same place where it says that it is illegal to send
> XHTML1.1 as image/png.
> > I didn't notice anything in the XHTML 1.1 specs about the proper MIME
> > media type, and this was not a listed change from 1.0, which does
> > explicitly allow text/html, but I could easily have missed something.
>
> The changes section is non-normative.
>
>
> Also, text/html's RFC [1] only says "In addition, [XHTML1] defines a
> profile of use of XHTML which is compatible with HTML 4.01 and which may
> also be labeled as text/html", which references to a profile of XHTML 1.0,
> not 1.1, which, in addition, bans internal subsets [2].
>
> [1] http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2854
> [2] http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/ section 3.1.1 items 1 and 5.

I can't see that.

And the note http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-media-types/ says XHTML 1.1 should 
not, but not must not, be sent as text/html.

RFC 2854 is not valid in this case, anyway, it is outdated because it does not 
know anything about XHTML 1.1 and is of no use here, I think.

RFC2854 says nothing about XHTML 1.1 or the internal subset of a DTD. (at 
least I could not find anything about that in there)

I consider the note about xhtml media types to be more important.

The should not instead of a must not in the note is because there are authors 
that know of how to write XHTML 1.1 or XHTML Basic in a compatibility manner 
so it is still as compatible to HTML 4.01 as XHTML 1.0 may be.

The point is that using internal subsets is basically allowed to extend XHTML 
1.1, otherwise it would have been explicitely forbidden as it is in XHTML 
Basic. (That's my personal interpretation, of course)

You can extend it with anything you want.
Now some people extend it with legacy attributes, and the question is, should, 
must, may, should not, must not browsers use the old semantics for those 
deprecated legacy elements or not.

I say they if the document is served as application/xhtml+xml they may, as 
long as the element or attribute is specified in XHTML Modularization, and be 
it the deprecated legacy module.

If the document is served as text/html, it's tag soup anyway. Some ua's might 
render the internal subset, of course, then.
But I'm not quite sure wether really no legacy browser renders the internal 
subset, entities declared there, for instance, if the document is served as 
text/html.
I have to go to work, so I don't have time to check this out right now.
I have the feeling, that Mozilla and IE6 interpret at least entities from the 
internal subset of the DTD, even when the document is served as text/html. 
But I may be wrong.


Bye
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Received on Monday, 9 December 2002 00:47:48 UTC