xml-dev - Re: Who needs XHTML Namespace?

[Paul Prescod <paul@prescod.net>]

David Megginson wrote:
> 
> While we're still a ways away from having schemas that allow
> document-type assembly from other schemas, the most important task for
> XHTML (other than saying that XHTML should be well-formed XML, which
> is a bit of a truisim), is to establish an XHTML Namespace so that
> processors can discover HTML markup in arbitrary XML documents.   We
> don't need Namespace-aware schemas or anything else to do that.

What is the virtue in discovering XHTML data in an arbitrary document if
there are *no rules* about what that information will look like? Are you
really going to write processors that do not care whether images occur
within titles or tables within images?

XHTML has only two virtues: common semantics and a well-defined grammar.
The former are not useful without the latter. You cannot even write a
stylesheet without an (explicit or implied) schema.

 Paul Prescod

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