- From: Simon St.Laurent <simonstl@simonstl.com>
- Date: Fri, 06 Apr 2001 23:56:27 -0400
- To: www-talk@w3.org
At 05:25 PM 4/6/01 -0700, Russell O'Connor wrote: >Section 7.7 of the RDF specfication says to drop RDF in the head of an >HTML document. <http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-rdf-syntax/> > >I don't get it, the result isn't HTML. Why would the recommend such a >thing. It makes me feel sick to my stomach. They qualify it: >RDF, being well-formed XML, is suitable for direct inclusion in an HTML >document when the user agent follows the HTML recommendations for error >handling in invalid documents. That takes you to the informative (non-normative) Appendix B.1 of HTML: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/appendix/notes.html#notes-invalid-docs And the information in B.1 is pretty severely inconsistent with the later XHTML approach: >This version of XHTML provides a definition of strictly conforming >XHTML documents, which are restricted to tags and attributes from >the XHTML namespace. (http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/#docconf) There is a section which leaves open other possibilities, the much-debated 3.1.2: >[See Section 3.1.2 for information on using XHTML with other namespaces, >for instance, to include metadata expressed in RDF within XHTML documents....] >The XHTML namespace may be used with other XML namespaces as per [XMLNAMES], >although such documents are not strictly conforming XHTML 1.0 documents as >defined above. Future work by W3C will address ways to specify conformance >for documents involving multiple namespaces. (http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/#well-formed) Section 3.1.2 would probably be responsible for as many namespace controversies as Namespaces in XML itself if it weren't for the fact that fewer people find XHTML details a worthy topic for debate. There have been a number of discussions on XHTML-L about this, however. (Archives at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/XHTML-L) I think your nausea is entirely appropriate, and hope we reach some kind of genuine resolution about namespaces and validation in the next year or two. I don't see W3C XML Schemas offering much hope in this regard, though they at least clarify a number of basic namespace and validation issues. It'll be a while. Simon St.Laurent - Associate Editor, O'Reilly and Associates XML Elements of Style / XML: A Primer, 2nd Ed. XHTML: Migrating Toward XML http://www.simonstl.com - XML essays and books
Received on Friday, 6 April 2001 23:56:18 UTC