[whatwg] Re: Is this introducing incompatibilities with future W3C work

[David Hyatt]

This is actually not quite true.  There are a number of features that 
don't "just work" when you make a switchover to XML, and in fact the 
set is so non-trivial that I don't think you should gloss over this so 
readily.  In general both Mozilla and Safari's application/xml+xhtml 
support lags substantially behind their text/html support.  Neither 
browser can even render XHTML incrementally for example (last time I 
checked at least).

Some other examples are features like .innerHTML, DOM serialization, 
and contenteditable.  HTML elements have all sorts of situations where 
code that is written to handle HTML streams or HTML editing concepts 
has to change to deal with XML streams etc.

dave

On Jun 25, 2004, at 4:52 PM, Ian Hickson wrote:
> I've already explained. It's not a matter of bothering to change it. If
> Opera, Mozilla, or Safari add support for a feature in HTML, then
> automatically that feature will be supported in XHTML. They would have 
> to
> go well out of their way to _prevent_ the new feature from working in
> XHTML. Given that there is no benefit (beyond some theoretical "well 
> W3C
> might change their plans and add something to XHTML1") and there is 
> some
> loss (authors who do want to use XML would be unable to use these new
> features), it is highly unclear why these vendors would want to add the
> extra bloat to do this.
>
> -- 
> Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    
> fL
> http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ 
> ,.
> Things that are impossible just take longer.   
> `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'