XHTML DTDs failing in IE5

Simon St.Laurent simonstl at simonstl.com
Thu Jun 3 21:15:51 BST 1999


At 10:21 AM 6/3/99 -0700, Andrew Layman wrote:
>I want to emphasize that my earlier message was intended to clarify what the
>actual behavior of MSXML is, not to describe what the best behavior should
>be. In this list and in others, there have been strong and conflicting
>opinions expressed on what would be the best behavior of a parser, and no
>settled standard exists.  I believe that people will continue to post
>opinions on what a parser should do. I do not, in fact, know that the IE5
>rules are the ultimately best rules; what we can say in their favor is that
>because they are conservative, they do not encourage the creation of
>documents that are accepted by MSXML and yet are later rejected by
>conformant parsers after standards have been worked out. As we are gaining
>experience with namespaces, this seems a prudent course.

Perhaps I'm just confused, but this seems to privilege the namespaces rec
way above the XML 1.0 rec.  Not only that, but #FIXED as a requirement for
namespace attribute declarations doesn't appear anywhere in the Namespaces
rec.  Rather than being conservative, I'd have to call this fairly radical.

It may seem grotesque to let people override the declarations in the
document, but I don't think it's that impossible to come up with cases
where it might actually be useful, and I can't see any reason why #FIXED
declarations should be mandatory.

Simon St.Laurent
XML: A Primer / Building XML Applications
Inside XML DTDs: Scientific and Technical (July)
Sharing Bandwidth / Cookies
http://www.simonstl.com

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