RE: Promotion of XHTML

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[To: www-html@w3.org]

On Mon, 30 Dec 2002, Peter Foti (PeterF) wrote:

> Also, if <br /> in HTML was equivalent to <br>&gt;, then that would seem to
> indicate that every web browser out there is broken, and should display this
> as a line break followed by the greater than symbol.  I don't know what
> logic you are using to determine that <br /> = <br>&gt;, but it seems flawed
> to me.

Borris is correct.  Observe:

> sgmlnorm -d -c ~/sgml/catalog ~/sgml/15445/15445.dcl "<osfd>0"
sgmlnorm:/home/u2/grad/roconnor/sgml/15445/15445.dcl:28:33:W: characters
in the
document character set with numbers exceeding 65535 not supported
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "ISO/IEC 15445:2000//DTD HyperText Markup
Language//EN">
<HTML><HEAD><TITLE>TEST</TITLE><BODY><P>break<br />ing</P></BODY></HTML>
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "ISO/IEC 15445:2000//DTD HyperText Markup
Language//EN">
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>TEST</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<P>break<BR>&gt;ing</P>
</BODY>
</HTML>

As you see, sgmlnorm parses <br /> as <BR>&gt;.  The same thing will
happen if you use HTML 4.01 instead of ISO-HTML.

Most popular browsers fail to follow the requirements indicated by Section
B.3.7 of the HTML 4.01 recommendation.

It blows my mind that the W3C seems to bury it's head in the sand about
the <br /> issues with ``compatibility'' between XHTML and HTML.  I just
don't understand what they were thinking when they came up with such
plainly false claims of compatibility.

- -- 
Russell O'Connor            <http://www.math.berkeley.edu/~roconnor/>
``[Law enforcement officials] suggested that the activists were stopped
not because their names are on the list, but because their names resemble
those of suspected criminals or terrorists.'' -- SFGate.com

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Received on Tuesday, 7 January 2003 02:23:50 UTC