why distinctions within XHTML?

David Brownell david-b at pacbell.net
Tue Aug 31 18:36:39 BST 1999


Mark Birbeck wrote:
> 
>  6. There are three variants of HTML 4.0 so we need three variants
>     of 'HTML 4.0 as XML' (let's call it XHTML).

Isn't that assertion pretty core to this debate?  That is, it's
not a generally accepted assumption.

Lots of people think of HTML as _one_ vocabulary, where you'll
avoid certain words (some even have four letters :-) to fit into
certain subsets (e.g. "strict" ~= "NC-17", "HTML 3.2" ~= "PG-13").

This is the "commonality" argument -- we're striving for common
vocabularies and reuse, broadening markets not restricting them,
making software general purpose (while allowing specialization
in those few cases it's needed).


Oh, there's also a major procedural issue too:  discussions about
technical issues, such as the one above, were discarded by the
sudden appearance of a major directional change, one week ago, in
a draft called "PR" despite having such a controversial change.

That's the whole "W3C isn't being fair with the web community"
set of issues -- autocratic behavior clearly on the rise.

- Dave

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