- From: Boris Zbarsky <bzbarsky@MIT.EDU>
- Date: Fri, 14 Nov 2008 10:12:42 -0500
- To: "Henry S. Thompson" <ht@inf.ed.ac.uk>
- CC: public-html <public-html@w3.org>, www-tag@w3.org
Henry S. Thompson wrote:
> Not sure I understand. The XML spec. only mentions media types in
> passing in its discussion of (natural) language and encoding
> determination. It defines well-formedness (in general) and validity
> (wrt a DTD).
>
> An example of what you have in mind would help.
Sure. Here's an example:
data:text/xml,<?xml-stylesheet
href="data:text/css,*{font-weight:bold}"?><root>text <outer>outer
<inner>inner</outer>
Try loading that in your favorite browsers and seeing what happens.
Note that some of them display some bold text, while others do not.
This is because the XML specification _does_ say that this document is
invalid (that is not XML), but _doesn't_ say that this means you can't
process it and _doesn't_ specify the error handling other than saying
that processing of things after the error needs to be aborted.
The text/xml part is not important here except insofar as it triggers an
XML parser in browsers. The key is that a priori any XML parser can
take an arbitrary character input stream and does _something_ with it.
What the something is happens to be underdefined, with a good bit of
leeway as to what it actually is.
If you think that would be a good state for HTML to be in, I beg to
disagree. Underdefined behavior is bad.
-Boris
Received on Friday, 14 November 2008 15:13:33 UTC