[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)
Paul Prescod writes: > 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. I agree that there needs to be some sort of versioning available -- it could be an html:version attribute (the best solution, I think), or perhaps just the version of the DTD used in the DOCTYPE declaration (much messier). I think that Namespaces are the wrong tool to use for versioning, because using them that way makes easy, typical jobs much harder, and that's just bad design. > > 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." Fortunately, XML isn't source code (or compiled code), so we don't have the same problem -- I was using that example only to demonstrate that once there's software deployed that recognizes a certain set of XHTML Namespaces (preferably a set with one member), it will be very difficult to introduce any new Namespaces. > 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. They already have the mechanism: if you see an unknown attribute, ignore it; if you see an unknown element, ignore its start and end tags and process the content. It's not elegant, but it's workable. That said, as I mentioned above, I agree that some sort of versioning is needed -- the three-Namespace approach just seems equivalent to amputating my leg to get rid of a wart. All the best, David -- David Megginson david@m... http://www.megginson.com/ 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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