Re: XHTML with Internet Explorer

"William F Hammond" <hammond@csc.albany.edu>
> "Jim Ley" <jim@jibbering.com> writes:
>
> > What is the compatibility subset?   Could you please document it -
remember
> > Appendix C is informative and 5.1 and RFC 2854 don't make it any more
than
> > that we're repeatedly told.
>
> I look at it this way: RFC 2854 and the various specifications for
> HTML <= 4.01 notwithstanding, "text/html" has been declared de facto
> the arena for "tag soup".

I agree, 2854 gives explicit blessing to serving tag-soup as text/html.

> This appears to have been
> based simply on observed behavior of historic tag soup user agents.

Yep, but instead of noting this with interest suggesting that you could send
XHTML like tag-soup or any other kind of tag-soup and have it render. The
normative section 5.1 specifically encourages text/html for XHTML1, even the
modified XHTML1 doesn't favour application/xhtml+xml.  It says that
text/html is a valid mime-type for XHTML - and does not mention that it's
because XHTML is enough like tag-soup that UA's will render it.

> It's not a perfect world, and there's more than one imperfect player
> in it.

Indeed it would be nice if the WG instead of defending their imperfections
and leaving issues open for many months, would either say "we're not going
to support XHTML 1.0 any more, yes it's broken, but there's nothing useful
to be done fixing it" or "yes we'll address the issues."

Jim.

Received on Wednesday, 5 November 2003 14:41:58 UTC