[Haskell-cafe] ANNOUNCE: Haddock version 2.8.0

[David Menendez]

On Sat, Sep 4, 2010 at 11:07 AM, John Millikin <jmillikin at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 3, 2010 at 23:02, David Menendez <dave at zednenem.com> wrote:
>> Yes, using foreign namespaces is one of the things recommended against
>> when serving XHTML as text/html. This says nothing about documents
>> following the recommendations in Appendix C.
>>
>>> I'm not debating that it's *possible* to serve HTML with an XHTML
>>> mimetype and still see something rendered to the screen. Hundreds of
>>> thousands of sites do so every day. But to call this XHTML is absurd.
>>
>> I agree, if by "absurd" you mean "consistent with the letter and
>> spirit of the XHTML recommendation".
>
> Content served as text/html is not XHTML, any more than content served
> as text/plain or image/jpg is.

Metadata does not determine data. If I write "created: 1810" on the
Haskell Report, that does not make it 200 years old. If I seve a JPEG
image as text/html, it's still a JPEG image. We just wouldn't expect a
browser to render it correctly, because the metadata is wrong.

Appendix C describes a subset of XHTML, such that a document in
conformance with it may be interpreted usefully as HTML by most web
browsers. The document is still XHTML, and may be given to XHTML or
generic XML tools without difficulty.

> You seem to be under the common misconception that XHTML is merely an
> alternative encoding of HTML.

HTML and XHTML are not encodings of anything. They are markup
languages defined using SGML and the XML subset of SGML. There are
multiple HTML definitions of varying popularity, and the fact that we
can pass some XHTML documents to a web browser expecting HTML and get
acceptable results is consistent with the fact that we can pass HTML
3.0 (never implemented by any popular browser) with minimal loss.

-- 
Dave Menendez <dave at zednenem.com>
<http://www.eyrie.org/~zednenem/>