Basic Question

[David Megginson]

Dan Rudman <rudman at idetix.com> writes:

 [on XML's well-formedness constraints]

 > If this is the case, how can I deal with the fact that most HTML
 > documents are NOT well-formed and that most HTML design tools do
 > not enforce, require, or even sometimes support, well-formedness in
 > a document?

You'd best keep the two separate.  Try including the following in the
HTML:

  <link rel="whatever" type="text/xml" href="mystuff.xml">

Now, the HTML can stay as it is, and the XML can be properly
well-formed.  This approach is already best practice for including CSS
stylesheets (using <link>) and ECMA scripts (using <script>), and it
also has the twin advantages that many HTML documents can share the
same XML if necessary, and that you can update the XML information
without messing up the HTML pages.

There's nothing fancy about this approach -- even naive web designers
already use it whenever they include graphics on a web page (and they
often allow several pages to share the same JPEG logo, for example).


All the best,


David

-- 
David Megginson                 david at megginson.com
           http://www.megginson.com/

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