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[list4xt] Re: XHTML output handler nits
Subject: [list4xt] Re: XHTML output handler nits
User: Website From: Simon St.Laurent (simonstl@simonstl.com)
Date: 02/05/2000 - 15:44
At 05:11 PM 5/1/00 -0600, Mike Brown wrote:
>> I expect the XHTML 'legacy' rules to be with us for something too close
>> to eternity, and find your belief in straight--up XML output downright
>> dangerous. [...] I'll pass on what I see as your wild optimism regarding
>> the XMLization of HTML.
>
>I'm sorry I came off as anything close to optimistic! :) I agree with you,
>actually. I am just not looking forward to having to tell whoever inherits
>my work from me that this method that, according to the summary you put on
>xmlhack, "outputs XHTML" is not -- and should not be -- necessary for the
>kind of XHTML that I produce (which is used as a source tree for another
>transformation that produces, IMHO more apporpriately, HTML 4.0 for
>current browsers).
Yeah, that's prety much the same place I'm in. I just posted to XML-Dev
expressing similar frustrations. Using XHTML as an intermediate step is an
interesting strategy, if you're doing some intermediate processing, but I'm
not sure it's always necessary - hence my interest in getting tools to do
the XHTML version the first time.
>Perhaps I should have said that it undermines arguments for canonical
>equivalence of <foo/> and <foo /> to have the latter be necessary "for
>compatibility" when really you are trying to cram XML through a rendering
>engine designed for HTML. I don't think the compatibility guidelines
>should've been introduced at all for precisely this reason -- people will
>use them, and rely on them, for nearly forever.
I think actually it would have been better for someone to note this problem
long ago, and require XML empty tags to have whitespace between the name
and the /, but now we've got both and no smart way to fix it.
>Either way, the browsers won't change. They don't have to, since authoring
>for compatibility is recommended, and they can't afford to, since they are
>competing with one another to hide any technical unpleasantries from
>users. No browser maker wants to tell users a document is not well-formed.
>"Make it fit" seems to be the ethos all around. So I am quite pessimistic.
I'm extremely pessimistic. It may be that I just finished an XHTML book,
and don't think there's enough of a market out there, because there's no
sizable commercial body pushing XHTML at all and no community of users that
really cares (unlike XSLT, for instance).
>Sorry to have put you on the defensive.
Nope, nope, that's my fault. Too much coffee, too little sleep.
Simon St.Laurent
XML Elements of Style / XML: A Primer, 2nd Ed.
Building XML Applications
Inside XML DTDs: Scientific and Technical
Cookies / Sharing Bandwidth
http://fijidevelopmentbank.com
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