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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: XHTML survival rate?
 From: "Eric van der Vlist" <vdv@d...> > I think we have to face it: XML or not, pages on the web are what they > are, we have no power to enforce any format or specification and will > have to adapt our tools and relax our parsers if we don't want to > restrict ourselves to accessing an insignificant proportion of the web. The shortcoming is not XHTML but XML. Draconian error-handling is appropriate for formal data, but unworkable for casual documents where the user would prefer anything prints rather than nothing prints. We are starting to see HTML-to-SAX parsers, and I hope this will eventually lead to some alternative to XML for casual use*, perhaps even if specified as an error-handling policy. But there is another issue lurking: scoping. Xml:lang, xml:space and xmlns are all scoped in effect; there are (last time I checked) SVG attributes that had scoped effect. But these kind of attributes have no support in any schema language: we cannot provide a schema that tells software "if you copy a branch, bubble down this attribute too and transport that". The Fragment Context Specification approach has not taken off, because it is at the wrong level, apparantly, and requires too much infrastructure. So, given that there are attributes that have scope, but we don't have schema languages which declare that they should be propgated nor any tools to do it, it means that that kind of XML cannot be edited. I think this is why we see in XML such an emphasis on transformation rather than inclusion or cutting-and-pasting. The infrastructure is not their (neither in the specs or in proprietory systems). There is now some awareness about this for namespaces (in the recent discussions about whether namespace scope is itself an information item). So I think there are two good reasons why not to expect XHTML to take over from HTML for casual documents on the WWW: first because the XML's syntax requirements are too much, and second because the XML-family of specs has not come to grips with the general issue of scoping and its relationship to editing. Cheers Rick Jelliffe * For example, allowing <aaa bbb=ccc ddd=eee> and allowing </x></y></z> to be replaced by simple </z> or "&" and "<" in data, automatically correcting name capitalization, and sticking in namespace declarations and xml:space declarations as required. This would not be as slack as HTML, but might make the lions share of conservative HTML documents acceptable as XHTML. 
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