- From: olivier Thereaux <ot@w3.org>
- Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2005 16:13:51 +0900
- To: Philip TAYLOR <P.Taylor@Rhul.Ac.Uk>
- Cc: www-validator@w3.org
Hello, Philip,
On 13 Jul 2005, at 20:04, Philip TAYLOR wrote:
> Many thanks for the feedback, Olivier. I am most grateful
> to you for pointing out the defects in my DTD, which I shall
> fix immediately.
Great. Note that unless I hear objections in the enxt few days, I am
likely to re-add the Latin 1 entities FPI to the SGML catalogue, but
fixing your DTD will do no harm.
> As regards the DOCTYPE, however, and the
> disambiguation aspect :
>
> > The MIME Media Type (text/html) for this document is used to
> serve both
> > SGML and XML based documents, and it is not possible to
> disambiguate it
> > based on the DOCTYPE Declaration in your document. Parsing
> will continue
> > in SGML mode.
>
> this does seem a slightly worrying aspect. Presumably your
> "types database" is hard-coded, and knows only about
> W3C standard DOCTYPEs;
Right.
> do you think there is any mileage
> in allowing some "disambiguation pragmat" in non-standard
> DTDs, and if so, which is the right forum on which to raise
> this issue ?
This is a tough question, and I am probably by far the worst person
on this list to answer it, but let's give it a try anyway. Frankly,
even when talking about standard DTDs, we are in the realm of non-
normative. So it should not be a surprise that for non-standard DTDs,
the situation is even fuzzier...
- The text/html RFC is informative and makes no mention of the fact
that such documents should be parsed as SGML or XML
- There is no clear identification that a DTD is an SGML or XML one.
Well, there are as far as I know rules that XML DTD must follow, that
are stricter than SGML DTDs don't, so in a way you could use that.
But I might be wrong. And even if I am right, that's far fetched.
- Even for "standard" XHTML document types, I am not aware of a
normative clarification of how content served as text/html should be
parsed. And that's beyond the point of this thread, see: http://
www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=1500
The "informative" consensus, however, seems to be that text/html is
mostly for SGML applications, and the fact that XHTML can be served
as such is just a necessary evil ("necessary" and "evil" being, as a
matter of fact, both subject to endless arguing) - see http://
www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-media-types/#text-html. As a result, I think that
what the validator does with documents served as text/html and with
DTDs it doesn't know - parsing them as SGML - is correct.
But that is still heuristic...
And as to whom people should turn to for an actual answer, I guess
"no one"... The HTML WG could say something about it, but frankly,
they are already busy enough and the text/html situation is already
thorny enough with just the W3C standard DTDs that I can't imagine
they'd like to pronounce themselves on non-standard DTDs... But then
again, I might be wrong.
Hope this helps,
--
olivier
Received on Thursday, 14 July 2005 07:13:58 UTC