Re: Question about XHTML 2.0 and content type

On Thu, 2 Feb 2006, Laurens Holst wrote:

> In any case, XHTML 1.0 is a compatibility specification for HTML 4.01 
> expressed as XML.

That's what it says (though without the word "compatibility"), but it 
isn't true. There are several silent changes, and XHTML 1.0 is 
incompatible with HTML 4.01: no XHTML 1.0 document is an HTML 4.01 
document, and vice versa. (This follows, among other things, from the 
prose requirements that mandate the use of one of three fixed DOCTYPE 
declarations.)

> XHTML 2.0 is not, its a pure XML language,

XHTML 1.0 is just as pure XML as XHTML 2.0. The confused and confusing
statements in Appendix C don't change this.

> and thus it must not be served as text/html.

This depends on the definition du jour of text/html. If that definition 
says that flying pigs can be served as text/html, they can. The definition
is already arbitrary and sloppy, and always was, so if it happens to 
exclude XHTML 2.0 at present, things are so just by that arbitrary 
definition. (Allowing text/html for XHTML 1.0 postulates that user agents 
use the DOCTYPE declaration or similar methods to decide which HTML the 
stuff is, and there is no reason why this could not be extended to
XHTML 2.0, XHTML 3.2, etc.)

> That would be as wrong as e.g. labeling text/html 
> as text/plain.

There is nothing wrong with labeling an HTML document as text/plain.
Such labeling indicates that the data is to be treated as plain text, with 
no regard to any markup. This could be quite useful in some cases.
But there's a lot wrong with Internet Explorer's way of making a second 
guess and overriding the Content-Type header.

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

Received on Thursday, 2 February 2006 04:55:19 UTC