[whatwg] Seperation of Content and Interface

[Matthew Raymond]

Jim Ley wrote:
> On Fri, 20 Aug 2004 00:42:47 +1000, Lachlan Hunt
> <lachlan.hunt at iinet.net.au> wrote:
>>Why not?  It's been defined as an acceptable MIME
>>type for XHTML, and is, along with text/xml, the 
>>only registered type for any generic XML document.
> 
> Yep, but my argument is that if you're saying it's generic XML, a
> browser should not attempt to render it, as it doesn't know that the
> content is XHTML, and just rendering the parts that it understands is
> unsafe.

    This ignores the fact that the document may contain an XHTML 
doctype, thereby allowing the browser to identify it as a document it 
can render.

> (XML elements it doesn't understand could alarmingly change
> the semantics of the XHTML parts it does and renders.)

    Possibly, but what prevents that for other XHTML MIME types?

>>What?  The fact that it doesn't support HTML or XHTML at all
> 
> You're claiming IE doesn't support HTML now?

    I believe he's claiming that IE is not completely HTML 4.01 
compliant, which is correct.

>>Seriously, take a look at my site
>>in IE, and then tell me you still think IE is better at rendering,
>>compared with Mozilla and Opera!
> 
> Do you mean:  http://www.lachy.id.au/  ? in which case, I seem to get
> HTML 4.01 documents...  and the rendering is better than the firefox
> rendering, which seems really slow... not surprising as it waits for
> ages before starting to render it...

    It sounds like you're talking about performance when loading the 
page. With regards to correctly rendering the listed URL, the job IE6 
does is horrific, and it can hardly be fair to compare browsers based on 
performance when one of the browsers may enjoy a speed advantage as the 
result of nonconformance.

    Personally, when I compare IE, Mozilla and Opera on my own machine, 
there is little noticeable difference in load time.