Re: Relation between markup and transport

On Thu, 5 Jul 2001, William F. Hammond wrote:

> Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> Mon, 2 Jul 2001 16:12:17 -0700, writes:
>>> 1. More reliable CSS styling.
>>
>> Can you give me an example of a page written in XHTML that is
>> rendered more reliably than a page written in HTML 4?
>
> Surely, we're not discussing the behavior of a particular rendering
> agent here.  But for example, an incorrect HTML document cleaned up by
> Dave Raggett's "tidy" might indeed show up better.

???


>>> 2. Namespace extensions.
>> ...
>> section 5.1 of XHTML states that only documents that, by virtue of
>
> Section 5.1 explicitly allows as text/html a doc prepared consistent
> with appendix C without forbidding any other XHTML.

Nor allowing any other XHTML either.


> The recommendation provides a specfication for XHTML 1.0 without fully
> dealing with the issue of the relationship between the markup it
> describes and transport content type.

Probably one of the main reasons for the problems we are having.


>>> Remember that W3C's Amaya handles MathML under either transport
>>> content type.
>>
>> And does so by using a heuristic that makes it unable to render valid
>> HTML documents:
>>
>>    http://damowmow.com/mozilla/html-not-xml.html
>
> No.  Amaya, as an XHTML-aware user agent, complains correctly about
> the presence of an incorrect XML declaration.  The example fails also
> as HTML 4.01 in regard to the provision of section 7.1 that a document
> must begin with a doctype declaration.  It is only valid as an
> instance of the SGML application canonically associated, under the
> HTML 4.01 spec, with HTML 4.01.  It is a subtle point, but it is also
> an important point.

I guess now we're back to the issue of "is the normative reference to ISO
8879 really a normative reference".


>>> A. Oxford-TEI-Pizza-Chef-custom-brew-with-math under XML. Serve as
>>>    "text/xml". Browser provides tree portrayal if no external
>>
>> ...or if the application can render the document natively, for example
>
> Sure, whatever else the mass-market user agent might provide is OK;
> the tree representation is a minimal expectation.  The point is that
> such agents should not be allowed to "own" text/xml.  Such agents
> should be required to respect a user's webcap or mailcap entry for
> "text/xml" as for any other content type except possibly "text/html",
> which by historical precedent is an exception that plays the role of
> the web's default content type.

I see no reason for text/html to be treated any differently to text/xml,
image/png, or foo/bar.

-- 
Ian Hickson                                            )\     _. - ._.)   fL
Invited Expert, CSS Working Group                     /. `- '  (  `--'
The views expressed in this message are strictly      `- , ) -  > ) \
personal and not those of Netscape or Mozilla. ________ (.' \) (.' -' ______

Received on Thursday, 5 July 2001 19:44:22 UTC