why distinctions within XHTML?

[Hunter, David]

But it's not.  The purpose of XHTML today and tomorrow is the same as the
purpose of HTML was yesterday and today:  to convey information to a human.
Period.  (Usually visually, i.e. in a browser.)

That has nothing to do with transforming HTML to another XML vocabulary, as
in your previous email.  It doesn't really even have anything to do with
transforming other XML vocabularies into XHTML, although you can, since
XHTML is a vocabulary of XML.

It *does* have to do with changing our ways, at some point, and writing
XHTML instead of HTML.  XHTML is not an "intermediary", until we're ready to
write everything in another XML vocabulary.  When we're talking about
displaying information to a human, XHTML is the *destination*.  Or rather,
XHTML is *a* destination; as I said before, XML in other vocabularies can
also be presented to a human, using CSS or other technologies.  The idea
here isn't that we develop XHTML as a stop-gap solution, to be eventually
replaced.  XHTML is supposed to be a standard XML vocabulary that people can
use from this point on, whenever they want something to be presented to a
human.  Just like MathML is a standard vocabulary that people can use from
this point on whenever they have information of a mathematical nature [he
said, having never even looked at MathML...].

Which is why the important issue of "should we use three namespaces, or one
namespace, or many namespaces, or no namespaces" should be settled now.  If
this vocabulary is going to take off, we should try to eliminate the
mistakes in it.  (If any.)

David

-----Original Message-----
From: Mark Birbeck [mailto:Mark.Birbeck at iedigital.net]
Sent: Wednesday, September 01, 1999 11:24 AM

It's exactly on topic!! I am arguing that one of the main uses for XHTML
*today* is as an intermediary between old HTML and squeaky-clean new
XML. That's why we need three variants - because there's three (ish)
HTMLs. If you want to validate you have three DTDs to choose from, and
if you want to mix document types you have three namespaces to help you.
What you can't do is validate the mixed documents - but then who can ...
yet?

Mark

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