Re: text/html for xml extensions of XHTML

Ian Hixie writes again in reply to Robert Miner:

> > What I would like to be able to do is prepare an XHTML document in
> > accordance with the HTML compatibility guidelines from Appendix C of
> > the XHTML spec, *except* for the inclusion of MathML instances.
> 
> In my opinion, browsers should not be promoting non-standard usage of W3C
> technologies as you have just described.

Ummm...  MathML instances, as namespace extensions of XHTML, are
not in the problem category for classical user agents described by
Appendix C.  Although the handling of these things with classical
agents is not likely to be robust and content providers must be fully
aware of that, it is misleading to say that namespace extensions for
XHTML are outside of the territory where the Recommendation says that
text/html may be used by a content provider.

Namespace extensions are NOT on the list of 13 warnings to content
providers in Appendix C.

The example http://www.mozilla.org/projects/mathml/start.xml *ought*
to be servable also as text/html.

A user agent that fails to deal with that resource as XHTML is out
of full compliance with the spec.  I would never, however, apply the
word "broken" to a user agent that is still under development and
for whose existence I am grateful.

                                     -- Bill

P.S.  Ian, of course you are absolutely right that a user agent
should never infer a content type from what appears to be a file
extension in a URI.  User agents that do this ARE broken.  Beyond
that there are security risks, especially in the case of things
served as "text/plain" and "application/octet-stream".

Received on Friday, 4 May 2001 08:00:17 UTC