- From: Dave Hodder <dmh@dmh.org.uk>
- Date: Sat, 04 Jun 2005 17:46:00 +0100
- To: Laurens Holst <lholst@students.cs.uu.nl>
- CC: Anne van Kesteren <fora@annevankesteren.nl>, www-html@w3.org
Laurens Holst wrote (with snippage):
> Anne van Kesteren wrote:
>
>> Laurens Holst wrote:
>>
>>> I think XHTML 2.0 should allow alt="..." as an alternative to
>>> enclosed alternate text. It could be used until content inside an
>>> element is sufficiently supported by all major browsers.
>>
>>
>> I think that would mean that you take the ugly bits of HTML 4.01
>> forward into XHTML 2.0. IMG was supposed to be replaced by OBJECT back
>> then as IMG is not really backwards compatible. Browsers have to
>> recognize the element in order to view its fallback content.
>
>
> But that has already happened with h1...h6, which are pretty ugly as
> well I’d say. Why not take that a little further and really make it work
> in ‘legacy’ (heh) clients.
This has already been done, it was one of the objectives of XHTML 1.0.
(See the HTML Compatibility Guidelines of the XHTML 1.0 Recommendation
<http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/#guidelines>.)
It wouldn't make XHTML 2 any more compatible with "legacy" user agents
anyway -- XHTML 2 achieves this compatibility through a user agent's
understanding of XML[1] (plus CSS and/or XSLT) rather than any intrinsic
knowledge of HTML 4 or XHTML 1.
(N.B. I'm Ccing this to www-html rather than www-html-editor because I
believe it's more on-topic there.)
Regards,
Dave
[1] It's sent with a media type like application/xhtml+xml or
application/xml, never with the text/html media type.
Received on Saturday, 4 June 2005 16:46:08 UTC