The only thing that makes XHTML something slightly different from XML is it's DTD.
Kind of like saying: "The only thing that makes females something slightly different from humans is their anatomical differences." The whole point of XHTML is that besides being HTML, it's also well formed XML.
I attempt to clarify what I meant by that in the discussion, http://discuss.webstandardsgroup.org/archives/000014.htm .
XHTML and XML are not synonymous, so if someone can articulate what is XHTML's relationship to XML, it would be useful.
Take the following sentence: "Mark went to the store and bought eggs, milk, bread, chicken, rice, and corn." Doesn't that sentence contain a unordered list?
Good point. I'm still not in agreement that <ul>/<ol>'s should be nested in <p>'s though. Maybe someone can clarify in the discussion how to view semantics in the context of this example.
if the devise is standards compliant (for the sake of argument, lets assume that's a safe assumption) there should be no problem.
Then why is WAP 2.0 a subset of XHTML 1.1 for example? Valid XML is not necessarily device independent markup, is it?
Except that mutations are random,
You're taking the analogy to far; I didn't say "all ways."
That's right, you didn't. Sorry.
While I agree that it can be taken to far, what does the "X" stand for but "eXtendable"?
Yes, it stands for eXtensible. Some extensions are legal, some not. It is legal to extend XHTML, but is lists in paragraphs the type of extension they are talking about?
Let's get some clarification at http://discuss.webstandardsgroup.org/archives/000014.htm .
Nelson
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On 30-Apr-04, at 2:29 AM, Mordechai Peller wrote:
Nelson Ford wrote:
The reason I brought this up� was...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.
Kind of like saying: "The only thing that makes females something slightly different from humans is their anatomical differences." The whole point of XHTML is that besides being HTML, it's also well formed XML.
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.
Take the following sentence: "Mark went to the store and bought eggs, milk, bread, chicken, rice, and corn." Doesn't that sentence contain a unordered list?
Another problem with that is that the purpose of the XML-based XHTML 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....
Last I checked, W3C's recommendations include CSS, <p>s, and <ul>s. (Hey look, another unordered list inside a paragraph.) Since all elements needed are already included in the recommendations, if the devise is standards compliant (for the sake of argument, lets assume that's a safe assumption) there should be no problem.
Take '<span class="pet">cat</span>' versus '<pet>cat</pet>'. Since <span> has no default style beyond being inline, they both should display the same. They are equally machine readable. But the latter is more human readable, which is one of the reasons behind XML in the first place.
�In many ways it's similar to mutations in DNA
Except that mutations are random,
You're taking the analogy to far; I didn't say "all ways."
[M]y point is that if we want to be changing the DTD's, we shouldn't be pretending it is still XHTML.
While I agree that it can be taken to far, what does the "X" stand for but "eXtendable"?
Mordechai
