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Re: Talking of HTML.... Anyone like lock-in?

• To: davep@d...
• Subject: Re: Talking of HTML.... Anyone like lock-in?
• From: Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@i...>
• Date: Sat, 3 Sep 2005 01:46:51 +0300
• Cc: XML Developers List <xml-dev@l...>
• In-reply-to: <1123872120.3386.28.camel@marge>
• References: <1123780181.3496.27.camel@marge> <42FB8AF9.9080600@e...> <937259024a0c450a65b9a613a3d699d9@i...> <1123872120.3386.28.camel@marge>

On Aug 12, 2005, at 21:42, Dave Pawson wrote:

> On Fri, 2005-08-12 at 09:20 +0300, Henri Sivonen wrote:
>> I consider DTDs harmful in the browser context in particular,
>
> At least with DTD's and XML we have the option.
> With XHTML as proposed, you've lost that option.

No. DTDs are not an option for browsers. Browsers have to say "No!" to 
DTDs for performance reasons. None of Mozilla, Opera and Safari 
actually load any of the XHTML 1.x DTDs. The reason why the XML spec 
made external DTD loading optional was that the writers of the spec 
considered external entities incompatible with browsers.

I think specifying character entities in a DTD and expecting them to be 
supported is a serious spec but in XHTML 1.x. Carrying this over to 
XHTML 2.0 means that the HTML WG is in denial about the relationship of 
DTDs and interactive user agents and wants to wish the consequences of 
the XML spec away.

(Nope, even Mozilla does not load the said DTDs. Under certain 
conditions it loads a bogo-DTD that only contains the declarations for 
character entities.)

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@i...
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/

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