Re: Difference of TEXT and XHTML?

Antone Roundy Thu, 27 Jan 2005 09:09:44 -0800

On Thursday, January 27, 2005, at 12:47 AM, Eric Scheid wrote:

On 27/1/05 6:23 PM, "Henri Sivonen" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
But type='TEXT' is only a degenerate case of type='XHTML' (type='XHTML' with only text content). What value does type='TEXT' add to the format except the ability of feedvalidator.org to detect cases where there are element children although the author claims there are not, which suggests an authoring error? Does type='TEXT' intentionally exist only to add this feedvalidator.org value?
maybe it exists so I can write a title which looks like this
    "I hate the <blink> tag"
which is the plain text rendition, or if I wanted to code it in html/xhtml it would be
    "I hate the &lt;blink&gt; tag"
and then applying XML escaping ... would be the following? ...
    <title type='TEXT >I hate the &lt;blink&lt; tag</title>
    <title type='HTML >I hate the &amp;lt;blink&amp;&lt; tag</title>
    <title type='XHTML>I hate the &amp;lt;blink&amp;&lt; tag</title>

In a message sent off-list to me last June, which I no longer have, but referred to in a message on list[1], Sam said that:

        <content type="inline-xhtml">
                &amp;copy;
        </content>

should be rendered "©", not as a copyright symbol (because it's not in the XHTML namespace, ie. it's not this:)

        <content type="inline-xhtml">
                <span xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml";>&amp;copy;</span>
        </content>

...which seems to suggest that the above XHTML example should be:

        <title type="XHTML">I hate the &lt;blink&gt; tag</title>

or:

<title type="XHTML"><span xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml";>I hate the &lt;blink&> tag</span></title>

...of course, it's difficult to say whether applications actually WOULD do it that way, or whether they'd treat the text as if it were in the XHTML namespace based on the @type value. Getting rid of @type="TEXT" could lead to a situation similar to RSS 2.0 where content that is intended to be rendered as plain text was being treated as markup. If people use @type="XHTML" without a namespace for content intended to be rendered as plain text, they'll still have this problem, but if they have the option of @type="TEXT", they'll have an unambiguous way to do it without having to add gratuitous markup.

Thus, -1 on PaceTypeTextRedundant.

Antone

[1] http://www.imc.org/atom-syntax/mail-archive/msg04249.html

Re: Difference of TEXT and XHTML?

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