Re: XHTML Considered Harmful

On Mon, 25 Jun 2001, Arjun Ray wrote:
>
> On Sun, 24 Jun 2001, Ian Hickson wrote:
>
>> What is wrong with XHTML itself, though? Don't forget Appendix C is
>> non-normative!
>
> You're forgetting the conformance requirements.  Besides the usual
> silliness with doctype declarations (see www-html, from late December
> 1999 into January 2000), there's a bunch of "musts" whose provenance
> is clearly a historically inherited notion of "compatibility".  I'll
> repeat the references, and add one:
>
>   http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-html/2000Jan/0255.html
>   http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-html/2000Jan/0246.html
>   http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-html/2000Feb/0000.html

I've read all three of those, and don't understand the problem.

XHTML (1 Strict) says *nothing* about rendering. It talks purely about
semantics. The styling is done using some appropriate transformation
from a DOM to a rendering tree (e.g. CSS or, god forbid, XSL:FOs).

In a non-validating UA, this means you can pass well-formed junk to the UA
and it will render as per the CSS rules. (In a validating UA, valid XHTML1
Strict will never contain anything that isn't XHTML1.)

So what?

The rendering rules are well defined (by the styling language). The
processing rules are well defined (if it is invalid, then semantics are
void). What more do you want?

-- 
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 Monday, 25 June 2001 01:38:04 UTC