Re: RESEND: Extending xhtml? How?

On Jan 23, 2004, at 4:46 PM, Brad Cox wrote:

> That's so much for the most helpful reply, Curt. I've been struggling 
> with the modularization spec, trying to use the approach described 
> there, but wasn't confident I was on their right track. Never managed 
> to find the url you sent I'll dig into that further tomorrow.
>
> But I'm confused by the encouraging tone of "you  could use an import 
> statement and an appropriate namespace declaration to allow you to use 
> XHTML elements and constructs in your schema, so you could say 
> <ile:page> can contain specific elements or groups from the XHTML 
> schema" and the discouraging tone of the closing one re "annotated 
> XHTML".
>
> The former sounds like just what I want, and that the technique 
> described in the Modularization spec will get me there eventually, 
> regardless of what the XHTML designers planned for. Is that correct?
>

XMLSchema can allow you to validate extensible applications, but can't 
make closed applications open against their will.  You can't add new 
elements to XHTML and still call it XHTML or expect existing XHTML 
processors to accept those documents.  As XHTML evolves that may 
change.

If your objective is to have additional information in a document that 
will also properly render in XHTML browser like Mozilla and can be 
edited by an XHTML compatible editor, then your options are to embed 
the additional info using processing instructions or comments or to use 
an external document to make statements about elements within the 
document.

If your objective is to reuse XHTML constructs but do not have a 
requirement that the documents be valid XHTML, then you can create your 
own application and import and use XHTML constructs.  However, XHTML 
browser would not attempt to render that document as anything other 
than arbitrary XML though you could provide a stylesheet.

Received on Friday, 23 January 2004 18:13:44 UTC