Re: Is this legal XHTML 1.1?

On Mon, 9 Dec 2002, Christian Wolfgang Hujer wrote:
> 
> 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.

If you read RFC2119, you'll find that SHOULD NOT is equivalent to MUST
NOT for most cases. I certainly can't see any amazingly important reason
to use XHTML 1.1 over HTML 4.01 (or XHTML 1.0) in this case, ESPECIALLY
if backwards compatability is important.

In any case that note is just that, a note. It is non-normative.


> RFC 2854 is not valid in this case, anyway, it is outdated because it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.

RFC 2854 is the _only_ specification allowing you to use text/html at all.
It has the final word on the MIME type because it _is_ the MIME type.


> 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)

It refers (indirectly) to XHTML 1.0 section 3.1.1, of which items 1 and 5
make an internal subset illegal.


> 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)

To extend it, yes. But extending XHTML 1.1 makes a document non-strictly-
conformant XHTML 1.1.


> If the document is served as text/html, it's tag soup anyway.

Exactly. So using an XML variant is pretty pointless.

   http://www.hixie.ch/advocacy/xhtml


> 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. 

Mozilla makes no attempt to parse the internal subset in HTML.

-- 
Ian Hickson                                      )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
"meow"                                          /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
http://index.hixie.ch/                         `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Monday, 9 December 2002 02:58:48 UTC