Re: XHTML Applications and XML Processors [was Re: xhtml 2.0 noscript]

On Fri, 4 Aug 2006, Karl Dubost wrote:

>> http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2004/07/21/dive.html
>
> Hehe and then?
> we could say the same about HTML on the Web. It is not HTML.

I guess the point was that XML has strongly been described, advertized, 
and hyped as making a change because it is strict and requires 
software to process is strictly by the book. It is very common to see
such things listed among essential differences between HTML and XML - even 
in W3C materials - as if SGML and HTML specifications allowed the common
faults in browsers.

For example, the XHTML 1.0 specification lists "Documents must be 
well-formed" as the _first_ among differences between XHTML 1.0 and XHTML 
4.01 ( http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/#diffs ). It even claims that 
"Well-formedness is a new concept introduced by [XML]." XML coined a new 
word, but syntactic correctness is not a new _concept_. Perhaps the 
statement refers to the specific feature in XML syntax that end tags are 
compulsory, but that simply means selecting a subset of SGML's 
possibilities.

So when correctness or rigorousness is so heavily presented as a major 
feature of XML, we could say that to the extent that XML rules on the web 
(as a document format actually sent via HTTP), it's not the XML that has 
been in the news for years.

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

Received on Friday, 4 August 2006 06:15:34 UTC