RE: [CSS21] Make XHTML <body> magic just like HTML <body>

It is not a question of a fashion. In many cases authors move to XHTML
because they have to. For instance, some eBook specs mandate XHTML and
not HTML. And XHTML does offer at least some advantages (like being able
to reliably process your content with an off-the-shelf XML parser), so
people do have legitimate reasons to switch.

What is the purpose of making this different for XHTML and HTML anyway?
I can kinda understand it for the table cell allocation algorithm, but
not for the body element.

Peter

-----Original Message-----
From: www-style-request@w3.org [mailto:www-style-request@w3.org] On
Behalf Of Patrick H. Lauke
Sent: Wednesday, March 07, 2007 11:07 AM
To: www-style@w3.org
Subject: Re: [CSS21] Make XHTML <body> magic just like HTML <body>


Simon Pieters wrote:
> 
> Having special rules for <body> in HTML but not in XHTML makes it
harder 
> for authors to switch to and from XHTML.
> 
> There are lots and lots of pages that rely on the magicness in HTML.
So 
> it can't be removed from HTML.
> 
> There are very few XHTML pages on the Web. Some of them might look 
> incorrect because the author thought the <body> was magic, but it
wasn't 

To be hardline, though: authors that do not understand these types of 
differences between XHTML and HTML should not switch, then. If they get 
caught out by the non-magic behaviour of <body>, then they're probably 
(and I'll make a sweeping generalisation) the types of authors that 
don't quite know why they should be moving to XHTML in the first place 
and are only doing it because "it's fashionable" nowadays.

P
-- 
Patrick H. Lauke
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Received on Wednesday, 7 March 2007 19:42:01 UTC