Re: new TAG issue TagSoupIntegration-54

On 10/26/06, L. David Baron <dbaron@dbaron.org> wrote:
> On Thursday 2006-10-26 00:42 -0400, Mark Baker wrote:
> > FWIW, I spearheaded the creation of an XHTML media type in large part
> > because I was concerned that without one, HTML UAs would find
> > themselves having to deal with XML/XHTML "isms" in their HTML code
> > path.  If Ian's correct about how browsers work today - which I assume
> > he is - it seems that they decided to tackle those issues anyhow.
>
> Well, it's not exactly that there was anything to tackle.

I apologize; I totally misread Ian's last statement.  He was saying
that browsers currently *cannot* hand off documents served as
text/html to XML parsers.  A test consisting of an XHTML document
delivered as text/html, which includes script inside a CDATA section,
confirms this, at least for Firefox; the script isn't executed.

I maintain though, that the situation Ian describes is desirable; if a
publisher intends XHTML/XML semantics, then they should use
application/xhtml+xml.  So if Alice had sent the document to Bob as
application/xhtml+xml, then Bob would have said "Sorry Alice, I can't
handle that".  Even if Bob had ignored the media type, done his edits,
then sent it back to Alice as text/html, her UA should process it as
HTML, not XHTML (unless she overrides that, in which case it's her
fault).

Mark.

Received on Thursday, 26 October 2006 16:07:01 UTC