Subject: Re: XHTML
From: Karl Ove Hufthammer (huftis@bigfoot.com)
Date: Thu Jan 27 2000 - 09:48:42 CST
----- Original Message -----
From: "Eric W. Sink" <eric@sourcegear.com>
To: "Paul Rohr" <paul@abisource.com>
Cc: "sam th" <sam@bur-jud-118-039.rh.uchicago.edu>;
<abiword-dev@abisource.com>
Sent: Wednesday, January 26, 2000 11:50 PM
Subject: Re: XHTML
> Basically, I agree with this. I just feel like restating it
> for the sake of redundancy:
>
> 1. XHTML and HTML are distinct formats. For the purpose of
> implementation, we should treat them as completely unrelated.
>
> 2. An HTML exporter is an important feature now. An
> XHTML exporter is a more forward-looking idea. Having
> both is okay. Replacing our HTML exporter with XHTML
> is not okay, since HTML is widely supported
> by other vendors and XHTML is not.
An XHTML exporter is really just a HTML exporter where all elements are
closed (not nesseccary in HTML), empty elements contain a extra / and
all tags are written in lowercase.
XHTML will work properly in *all* browsers which support the HTML
standard, actually much better than most HTML that is out there (not
valid => difficult to parse).
I see no need for *two* exporters, one for HTML and one for XHTML, since
XHTML will work in all HTML UAs. That's like saying we need one exporter
for HTML 4, one for HTML 3 and one for HTML 2. HTML 4.01 documents will
work ok in HTML 3.2 browsers, since the browsers would ignore the new
4.01 elements/attributes. XHTML contains *no* new elements/attributes
...
--#
Karl Ove Hufthammer
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Thu Jan 27 2000 - 10:02:15 CST