[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: ATTN: Please comment on XHTML (before it's too late)
David Megginson wrote: > > 2. If the intention of XHTML is to continue to create new Namespaces > for future versions of XHTML, you run into a serious deployment > problem where old software will not work properly with new > documents. How can you know, in 1999, whether Internet Explorer 5.0 will work with HTML 6 documents? You cannot. If robust behavior is your primary goal then you must presume not. It is extremely suspect that an HTML 2.0 browser could just display an applet-bearing page without the applet and presume that that's "good enough." And EVEN IF that assumption is usually valid in the world of human-read documents there is no way you can build an ecommerce infrastructure on the hope that future versions will magically degrade nicely. We need a real graceful degradation strategy. > If you don't believe that versioning is a problem on > the Web, then look at the lack of even Java 1.1 applets for general > use (because Netscape 3.0 doesn't have a Java 1.1 VM). What would you have JavaSoft do? Pretend that Java 1.1 programs are really Java 1.0 programs so that the crash occurs deep in the JVM instead of at the point that the problem is first detected? "Hmmm. It's looking for a method I don't have. I'll just return NULL and hope it works." No version 1.x software can magically handle version 2.x data without a well-defined graceful degradation mechanism. You are asking the XHTML people to pretend that they have that mechanism when they do not. Paul Prescod xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ and on CD-ROM/ISBN 981-02-3594-1 To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; (un)subscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...)
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