[whatwg] several messages about XML syntax and HTML5

[Ian Hickson]

On Tue, 5 Dec 2006, Sam Ruby wrote:
> > 
> > Case in point:
> > 
> >    http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/2006/12/01/The-White-Pebble
> > 
> > In IE, there's some stray "XHTML HTML" and "XHTML HTML XML" text. This 
> > isn't acceptable to most people. It certainly isn't something that it 
> > would make sense to encourage. The worst possible outcome here would 
> > be for browsers like IE to start trying to parse this "SVG" in 
> > text/html, because the lack of any sensible parsing rules for it would 
> > guarentee that we're faced with even more "tag soup", thus undoing all 
> > the work that the HTML5 spec is trying to do to get us past that.
> 
> You are aware that I like to "tweak" IE users, right?
> 
> With the current technology, this could have been avoided with a single 
> div and two lines of CSS.  And I am most capable of doing that.

But that wouldn't help, e.g., Lynx users.


> In the longer run, I do believe that an architected simple rule like:
> 
>    xmlns attributes are invalid on HTML elements except html, and
>    when found on unrecognized attributes imply style="display:none"
>    unless you recognize the value of this attribute.
> 
> ... would channel those with insane desires to make extensions into 
> doing so in a manner that is harmless.  Such a rule might take a year or 
> two to get widely deployed, but the worst feet-draggers won't be 
> affected any worse than they were in the days when <table> was young.

There are millions of documents that would be "broken" by such a rule, 
so browser vendors couldn't actually deploy that, sadly. :-(

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
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