- From: Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi>
- Date: Sat, 12 Jul 2003 13:17:13 +0300
- To: www-html@w3.org
On Sunday, Apr 6, 2003, at 00:30 Europe/Helsinki, Tantek Çelik wrote: > People will write XHTML2 that "happens to work" in current/legacy > browsers > that don't actually have any support for XHTML2, kind of like people > are now > writing/sending XHTML1 that "happens to work" in current/legacy > browsers > that don't actually have any support for XHTML1. XHTML2 WD 6 says: "However, thanks to XML and stylesheets, such strict element-wise backwards compatibility is no longer necessary, since an XML-based browser, of which at the time of writing means more than 95% of browsers in use, can process new markup languages without having to be updated. Much of XHTML2 works already in existing browsers." The claims about compatibility with current browsers seem incompatible with XHTML2 being in its own namespace and not intended to be delivered as text/html. Current browsers have no idea about the upcoming XHTML2 namespace. Therefore, as far as the current browsers are concerned, XHTML2 is just some arbitrary XML stuff that doesn't have anything to do with XHTML1. The current browsers don't come with a meaningful UA style sheet for XHTML2. To some extent, current browsers allow arbitrary XML to be presented with CSS. However, there are important behaviors (eg. followable hyperlinks) that can't be associated to arbitrary XML using standard CSS. The author would have to ship a non-standard CSS+XBL+JS implementation of XHTML2 with every document. Besides, CSS is supposed to be optional, so relying on CSS to bind meaningful behaviors to an unknown (to the browser) type of document tree is not a robust solution. And that's assuming XHTML2 is served as application/xml or application/xhtml+xml. If XHTML2 is to be delivered using a new content type, the current browsers won't even attempt to process the documents beyond handing them to a helper app. So in what sense does any part of XHTML2 "happen to work" in any current browser? Also, what's the technical basis of the claim "Much of XHTML2 works already in existing browsers." in the working draft? -- Henri Sivonen hsivonen@iki.fi http://www.iki.fi/hsivonen/
Received on Saturday, 12 July 2003 06:17:28 UTC