Nelson Ford wrote:
The reason I brought this up was not because I had been seeing a lot of that talk on this list, but more on some forums on the internet where a standards beginner asks a question and someone pipes up: "Just change the DTD and we can all validate! [insert south park smile here]"... which I find kind of frightening. I think this is a really interesting and pertinent topic at this point as XHTML and CSS start to become the rule rather than the exception.
I wasn't even sure if browsers actually read the DTD to allow this to work.
The only thing that makes XHTML something slightly different from XML is it's DTD. Take away or alter this DTD and you no longer have XHTML, but rather (in my case) NFML. Both languages are XML based, but they have different semantic meanings for the same tags, if mine allows for <p>'s to contain lists.
The definition of "semantics" from dictionary.com is: "The study of relationships between signs and symbols and what they represent." So <p>'s represent paragraphs and <ul>'s represent unordered lists. Most people understand a paragraph to be a block of text, not a list, so if my interpretation is correct, making that change to a DTD would be detrimental to the semantics of the markup language.
Another problem with that is that the purpose of the XML-based XHTML (and WAP 2.0 which is a slightly stripped-down version of XHTML 1.1) is to allow for the display of the same documents across all kind of platforms and screen sizes. Making changes like that could harm XHTML's ability to achieve that goal as well, because the way XHTML behaves has taken years of tweaking and thought by a dedicated team.
In many ways it's similar to mutations in DNA
Except that mutations are random, but this is not. It is kind of like deciding we all start genetically engineering our children, some with 4 legs, some who are 11 feet tall , suddenly none of the standards, like doorways that are roughly 8-9 feet high, pants with 2 legs etc will work for the majority. It will breed chaos. Bizarre example, but I guess my point is that if we want to be changing the DTD's, we shouldn't be pretending it is still XHTML.
Nelson ------------------------------------------- Vancouver, BC www.nelsonford.net
Making a custom doctype to include one of XHTML 1.1's many modules does not make your code automatically valid. Why would the W3C make these modules available if not for use in custom DTDs? For something like the target attribute, semantics aren't an issue.
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