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

[Ian Hickson]

On Fri, 25 Jun 2004, David Hyatt wrote:
>
> 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.

Granted, for some of the less well-thought-through features of HTML4, the
assumptions made in the initial implementations have caused problems for
the XHTML implementations. Typically these differences are either in the
parser (e.g. <noscript> being implemented by dropping the nodes from the
DOM insteaad of hiding them conditionally; note that doing this in the
legacy dropping-from-the-DOM way is actually non-compliant anyway), or in
the DOM (e.g. serialisation).

The features in WHATWG are defined in such a way that they should not have
any problems of this kind, so my argument (that implementing them in both
technologies is easier than in just one) is still valid, I think.

> 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).

Again, that's a parser (or parser glue) problem.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'