Re: inline CSS - Argument for

me> --If you want a markup to propagate HTML formatted email then the modular
me> nature of XHTML will allow you to build a DTD for that usage, and
me> documents valid for that DTD will work on browsers.--

Daniel Hiester replies

> My question is, and maybe this is more something for the WG to consider, is
> how would you attach a DTD to an  XHTML-formatted email file?

as discussed at some length in a parallel thread on this mailing list
every XHTML document specifies the DTD in a way that in principle
allows a system to retrieve the DTD.

Although for the case at issue, where no special plugin or extension is
required to render the markup, a browser could just as well act as now
and not use the DTD at all.


> clients, and then we'll be in a mess! MS Outlook users
> wouldn't be able to send xhtml email to Netscape Communicator users, and so
> on. That's my fear at least... it may not be rational.

Well that is exctly the situation now if you send email as html.
There are a lot more email clients than those two, and there is no
reason to assume they read HTML.

However attatching DTD (or Schema) to the Markup does not solve that
problem, that only allows the document to be validated. You need some
kind of MIME mechanism to specify what systems are required to actually
handle the document. How to specify the MIME type for a document
that includes lots of features from lots of namespaces, requiring a
browser architecture that allows diferent plugin functionality to render
different parts of the document is of course a good question.
But there are other people on this list a lot more qualified than me to
answer that.

David

Received on Monday, 28 February 2000 09:58:20 UTC