Re: [Structure Module] Renaming the <html> element to more semantic name

On Wed, 7 Dec 2005, Bjoern Hoehrmann wrote:

>  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.

Are you quoting something? It sounds odd propaganda. Internet Explorer 
cannot handle XHTML 1.0 properly, and now you're saying the Web is safe 
for brave new XHTML?

OK, we can send any XML, including XHTML 2.0, to IE and other browsers, 
telling it is XML and shipping a style sheet with it. This is simply XML 
authoring, and "XHTML 2.0" is just a name for a particular sallad of tags

> So how could XHTML 2.0 be possibly not be compatible?

It was designed to be incompatible with the language used on billions of 
existing pages.

> Also note that
> XHTML 2.0 is the central part in W3C's effort to re-boot the web, as
> you can read on http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/future/
>
>  In discussions, it was agreed that further extending HTML 4.0 would
>  be difficult, as would converting 4.0 to be an XML application. The
>  proposed way to break free of these restrictions is to make a fresh
>  start with the next generation of HTML based upon a suite of XML
>  tag-sets.

We have been told, years ago, that HTML 4.0 (or, rather, HTML 4.01) has 
been turned into an XML application and the result is the current 
recommendation. It doesn't work on IE except when faked as good old HTML, 
and now you are saying that the idea was wrong in principle too (not that 
this would be surprising). Or maybe too difficult? The conversion _was_ 
made, though nobody cared to document exactly which changes were made 
(there are many silent changes in the language itself, though in minor 
details).

-- 
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

Received on Wednesday, 7 December 2005 17:42:49 UTC