Re: Date and time attribute type in conforming XHTML and valid HTML

On Mon, 6 Sep 2004 Wolfgang.Frech@xenium.de wrote:
> 
> Questions
> 
> How would you call this more-than-conforming property of
> an XHTML document?

"Conforming". Being syntactically correct according to the DTD is called 
being "Valid". Validity is important, but conformance is what matters. 
Validity is a subset of conformance.


> The HTML spec specifies the attribute type Datetime in its text, and it 
> references the ISO 8601:1988 and a W3C Note on date and time. For a 
> HTML-element ins, only one format is valid for the datetime attribute: 
> YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ssTZD, The HTML spec states explictly that the validity 
> is defined by both the DTD and additional constraints that cannot be 
> expressed in SGML.

Note that XHTML references HTML and thus this applies to XHTML as well.


> How would you call an XHTML document with attribute values
> that are also valid in HTML?

Nothing in particular.


> How should any program processing XHTML (user agent,
> parser) react to XHTML that is _not_ valid HTML?

This is sadly undefined at the moment. Some of the specs at www.whatwg.org 
attempt to add conformance criteria to XHTML and HTML to define some cases 
like this, which may be of interest.


> How would you call a program that processes or generates
> XHTML that is also valid HTML?  HTML-conforming,
> HTML-validating...?

If it outputs XHTML that conforms to XHTML (including HTML), then it is a 
conforming XHTML generator.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
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Received on Monday, 6 September 2004 12:58:21 UTC