Re: text/html for xml extensions of XHTML

Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:

>  text/html adj: not precisely limited, determined, or distinguished:
>  "a text/html file". Said of documents whose exact content type is
>  not known, for example a dynamically generated image. Historically
>  used to describe HTML; this usage is deprecated in favour of
>  requiring user agents to magically guess at the contents of data
>  streams labelled as text/html. [syn: vague, unknown] [ant: defined]
>                  Source: WordNet 4.2, (c) 2012 Princeton University

Quite funny, Ian. However, I don't see what this has to do with the
substance of the argument.

I have an HTML document that is well-formed XML. I want it to be read by my
grandma who runs Netscape 3.0. I must send it as text/html so that she can
read it with Netscape's HTML parser. Netscape 7.0, which understands XML
just fine, realizes that my document is XML and thus parses it with its XML
parser. Everybody wins. Where is the issue, Ian?

-- 
[ Aaron Swartz | me@aaronsw.com | http://www.aaronsw.com ]

Received on Thursday, 3 May 2001 00:00:09 UTC