Re: text/html for xml extensions of XHTML

[Simon St.Laurent]

At 11:45 PM 5/6/01 -0500, Aaron Swartz wrote:
>I'm not sure what you mean by this, and although I've spent a lot of time in
>the XML community, I've never heard it before. Certainly in data-oriented
>XML formats the whole idea is for XML to degrade gracefully (ignore new
>stuff). HTML has always followed this rule and I'd hope that XHTML would
>continue this even further.

Huh?  Ignore new stuff works in certain contexts, perhaps - with CSS, for 
instance, when there isn't explicit formatting specified for a particular 
element.

XML program structures, even without validation running, are typically far 
too brittle to ignore extra information caused by extra child 
elements.  You'd get a lot of strange errors where documents that could be 
processed in certain contexts would fail in others.

I've argued for a long while that flexibility (not standardization) of 
vocabularies is the real lesson of XML, but that's not reflected in current 
practice.


Simon St.Laurent - Associate Editor, O'Reilly & Associates
XML Elements of Style / XML: A Primer, 2nd Ed.
XHTML: Migrating Toward XML
http://www.simonstl.com - XML essays and books