xml-dev - Re: why distinctions within XHTML?

[Ann Navarro <ann@webgeek.com>]

At 11:18 AM 8/30/99 -0400, Simon St.Laurent wrote:
>At 11:01 AM 8/30/99 -0400, Ann Navarro wrote:
>>If I'm going to write an XHTML editor (that's worth anything as an *xhtml
>>editor* vs. just a plain text editor), I surely want to know whether the
>>differences in what can occur in a <p> in strict vs. transitional. If my
>>application doesn't know these differences, it can't provide appropriate
>>options or indicate errors appropriately. 
>
>It seems like DOCTYPE and the three DTDs should handle this without any
>problem.  I can't figure out why you'd want to bring namespaces into this.
>I could write an editor that recognized the namespace and did processing
>based on the namespace, but I think DOCTYPE would be simpler.  I don't
>think namespaces have to do this work.

Well, that really points out a weakness in namespaces, doesn't it? 
Everything must now have a namespace if it's to be compliant in XML-land.
Therefore XHTML has to have (a) namespace(s). 

Boom. We have to deal with them. 

>So do I - but I don't think this requires namespaces.

Me neither, but apparently they make the world go around these days. 

>Maybe it's time to reexamine the valid/not-valid distinction we get out of
>the XML 1.0 spec and start looking at more sophisticated 'weak validation'
>like Rick Jelliffe's discussed.

XHTML 1.0 is the very first step, taking the 3 versions we had in HTML 4.0
and transforming them into the XML world. 

Nothing in this says that work immediately after XHTML 1.0 will have all
three. 

'weak validation' or 'weak conformance' has been discussed at length, and
found to be a very, very bad idea. 

Ann
---

Author of Effective Web Design: Master the Essentials
Coming in September --- Mastering XML

Founder, WebGeek Communications            http://www.webgeek.com
Vice President-Finance, HTML Writers Guild http://www.hwg.org
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