On Fri, 17 Jul 2009 13:34:29 +0200, Ian Hickson <i...@hixie.ch> wrote:
On Fri, 17 Jul 2009, Steven Pemberton wrote:
On Fri, 17 Jul 2009 00:32:19 +0200, Ian Hickson <i...@hixie.ch> wrote:
> On Thu, 16 Jul 2009, Steven Pemberton wrote:
> >
> > So I can send XHTML5 as text/html if I want.
>
> No, you can't. If you send a document as text/html, then _by
definition_
> it is an HTML5 document, not an XHTML5 document. There is no other
way to
> distinguish them than the MIME type.
I very much disagree. It's my document, I get to say what it is.
Well, the author can say it is anything they want, but that doesn't
change what it actually is.
It is literally not possible to send XHTML5 as text/html, because as soon
as you label it as text/html, you are stating "it is HTML".
I used to think that too, but then I realised that in the real world it is
different. Browsers sniff, and media types are hard-wired into software,
rather than being an extension point. You have to row with the oars you
have got. As I said, I send documents with media type text/html, not
because they are necessarily HTML, but because I want them in the browser.
I agree that the document gets *processed* as HTML, but the document
doesn't magically change type just because it gets sent with a certain
media type.
Thanks to plugins, javascript, and similar techniques, the documents do
what I require of them. When I say "text/html" I don't mean "here comes
an HTML document", I mean "I want this in the browser".
Sure. But from the HTML5 spec's persective, if you send a document as
text/html, then by definition in is HTML5, not XML. The two syntaxes are
not distinguishable (e.g. <br xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"/> is
valid in text/html HTML5, with the / and the attribute being ignored by
the processing requirements; even some of the XHTML 1.x DOCTYPEs are
valid
in text/html HTML5), so there really is nothing but the author to claim
anything different, and the author isn't normative.
I'm not arguing about processing, I'm arguing about the document. And as
far as I am concerned, when it comes to saying what sort of document it
is, the author is most certainly normative.
Best wishes,
Steven
