[whatwg] DOCTYPE shouldn't be optional (fwd)

Fri Jul 9 06:56:00 PDT 2004

On Fri, 9 Jul 2004 13:39:41 +0000 (UTC), Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
> On Wed, 7 Jul 2004, Malcolm Rowe wrote:

> Ok, merging everything everyone proposed, the spec now says:
> 
> HTML documents that use the new features described in this specification
> and that are served over HTTP must be sent as text/html and must use the
> following DOCTYPE: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//WHATWG//NONSGML HTML5//EN">.

The MUST here is excessive I think (it prevents me adding my own
personal attributes, or removing them for improved QA on the web, as I
often do on my sites).

> XML documents using elements from the XHTML namespace that use the new
> features described in this specification and that are served over HTTP
> must be sent using an XML MIME type such as application/xml or
> application/xhtml+xml and must not be served as text/html. [RFC3023]

An XHTML document would therefore not be able to be served as
text/html, can you just clarify that this is deliberately meant to
prevent the XHTML as Appendix C carrying on - and XHTML WF documents
will be served as text/html would be a violation of the spec.

If this is the case, why do we have XHTML version of the spec?

Jim.