Re: Signing Document and PICS

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