Re: HTML/XHTML type issues, was: FW: XML Directorate Reviewer Comments

[Antone Roundy]

On Friday, April 15, 2005, at 02:30  PM, A. Pagaltzis wrote:
* A. Pagaltzis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2005-04-15 20:20]:
* Antone Roundy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2005-04-15 00:10]:
<feed xmlns="our namespace URI">
...
<atom:content type="XHTML" xmlns:atom="our namespace URI"
xmlns="XHTML's namespace URI">
<div>This is XHTML content,<br />
and the default namespace is XHTML's.</div>
</atom:content>
I like this. A lot.
One better, with my @type='xml' suggestion instead of
@type='xhtml':
    <feed xmlns="atom-ns-uri" xmlns:atom="atom-ns-uri">
        <!-- ... -->
        <atom:content type="xml" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml";>
            <p>This is XHTML content.</p>
            <p>The default namespace is XHTML's.</p>
        </atom:content>
        <!-- ... -->
    </feed>
That gets rid of the need to declare the atom: prefix over and
over.
While this approach has it's appeal, I'm pretty sure I'm in favor of 
keeping "xhtml" as a special case for a few reasons:

1) I presume ("when you presume you make a pres of you and me"?) that 
XHTML is going to be by far the most common XML type used in 
atom:content, and least for a while.

2) It makes it more difficult to determine the type of data.  We know 
it's XML, but to find out whether it's a flavor of XML that we know how 
to deal with, we have to discover the namespace of the content.  That 
will sometimes be easy to determine, as in the example above, because 
the namespace is declared on the content element.  However, sometimes, 
it may be done like this:

    <feed xmlns="atom-ns-uri" xmlns:xhtml="xhtml-ns-uri">
        <!-- ... -->
        <content type="xml">
            <xhtml:p>This is XHTML content.</xhtml:p>
            <xhtml:p>The default namespace is XHTML's.</xhtml:p>
        </content>
        <!-- ... -->
    </feed>
In this case, we'd have to find a child element and check it's 
namespace.  We've already discussed and rejected the idea of requiring 
namespaces to be declared at a particular point in Atom documents, so I 
think requiring to be declared in atom:content to make the type 
discovery easy has already been rejected.

The alternative would be to use the full MIME type instead of just 
"xml" and use that instead of the namespace to discover the type.  But 
there's still a problem...

3) Some people are still going to do it the way it's being done now, 
leaving us with the ambiguous status of the div.  Is it part of the 
content or just a container?

Antone