Re: XHTML Family Documents and Media Types

Hi Mark,

On Mon, Mar 17, 2008, Mark Birbeck wrote:
> Personally I see it as the other way around; it was a mistake to
> suggest that the MIME type and the document itself are inseparable.
> What has such an approach gained us over the years? Certainly not
> extensibility.

No, indeed, but will using text/html for a lot of really different
things, from an application of SGML, to an application of XML which (in
theory) could be mixed with other namespaces, to, well, "something else"
help extensibility and interoperability in the end?

I guess I'd withdraw my (again, very personal and possibly wrong)
opinion on XHTML as text/html if we can come up with a reliable way of
saying "this is not your grandma's HTML, this is actually
mixed-namespace XML that happens to be primarily XHTML". I believe this
was to be the point of using an XML media type for XHTML, but I can be
mistaken.

> But why insist that browsers must interpret those documents as XML?
> For example, sending a non-well formed XHTML document to Firefox means
> you get a blank page with lots of hyphens and a caret...what use is
> that to anyone?

Oh, you are preaching to the choir here (or the choir boy). I do,
however, think that an XML media type has much more interest than merely
stating "use draconian error handling".

-- 
olivier

Received on Monday, 17 March 2008 21:34:34 UTC