xml-dev - Re: ATTN: Please comment on XHTML (before it's too late)

[David Megginson <david@megginson.com>]

Paul Prescod writes:

 > You keep repeating that it makes your life so much harder but what would
 > be so brutal about standardizing and recognizing an equivalence
 > declaration? For HTML's simple idea of equivalence, it would be trivial.

It's going to be brutal just getting people to create well-formed
XHTML documents and to include the Namespace declaration; getting
software developers to recognize all three XHTML Namespaces (even if
doing so requires only a three lines of code) will be all the more
difficult, and introduces three times the opportunity for bugs and for 
interoperability problems because of omissions.

 > > Fortunately, XML isn't source code (or compiled code), so we don't
 > > have the same problem 
 > 
 > We have exactly the same problem. Assumptions about the form of the
 > input may cease to be valid when the input's version number
 > shifts. 

This will be the third time that I've mentioned that I agree that some
sort of versioning is useful.  Most processors won't care most of the
time, so the versioning shouldn't take a form that makes their life
harder, but what's wrong with a 'version' attribute in the HTML
Namespace?  Processors that don't need it can ignore it, and those
that do need it can still get the information they need.


All the best,


David

-- 
David Megginson                 david@megginson.com
           http://www.megginson.com/

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