Re: XHTML 1.0, section C14

On Mon, 27 Nov 2006, Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis wrote:
>
> On Sat, 25 Nov 2006, Shane McCarron wrote:
> > Let's all roll over and keep using 1997 technology and hacking around 
> > using weird-ass abstraction libraries to implement "Web 2.0" (gag-me)
> > on top of incompatible underlying implementations [...] In my world I 
> > always personally ignore */* in the accept header.
> 
> Then on Sun, 2006-11-26 at 00:24 +0000, Ian Hickson wrote: 
> > Assuming the first part of the above is supposed to be sarcastic and
> > the second part is not, I'm confused. You're condemning people for not
> > following the standards ("incompatible underlying implementations")
> > while simultaneously admitting to doing the same yourself?
> > 
> > Standards compliance begins at home.
> 
> As far as I can tell, this charge isn't quite fair. At the risk of
> repeating myself, the HTTP 1.1 specification allows Shane to interpret
> the Accept header any way she chooses.

And in many cases, e.g. for how to handle XHTML sent as text/html, or for 
how to handle anything sent as text/html, in fact, the "incompatible 
underlying implementations" are all conformant too. My point is that 
complaining about incompatible underlying implementations and then going 
ahead and doing the same is just hypocritical.

(For what it's worth, HTML5 requires text/html to only be used for HTML, 
and defines exact parsing rules, and requires XHTML to only be sent with 
XML MIME types, and requires that an XML parser then be used, making the 
whole "send XHTML as text/html" thing completely invalid, and making the 
whole "but XML is stricter" argument false at the same time.)

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Monday, 27 November 2006 20:29:58 UTC