Nicola Ken Barozzi wrote:
NKB> Ross Gardler wrote: NKB> ...
My point is, *no* (usable) intermediate format will be so expressive that it can accomodate all users.
On the XHTML side of things, the following text from the XHTML working draft convinces me that XHTML should be the intermediate format:
"The XHTML family is designed with general user agent interoperability
in mind. Through a new user agent and document profiling mechanism,
servers, proxies, and user agents will be able to perform best effort
content transformation. Ultimately, it will be possible to develop XHTML-conforming content that is usable by any XHTML-conforming user
agent."
If I am going to lose some semantic information I want to be sure that
the language I am using is so generic that I don;t lose any presentational information regardless of the media type. That is what
XHTML is designed for.
Am I making any sense?
NKB> Well said, we should put this part up on the site to explain why we use NKB> xhtml, it's exactly the point :-)
Has this happended yet?
Do you mean has it been documented? Sadly, no. It really would help if it were documented, that particular discussion has happened many times on this list. It is only because of your willingness to read archives that you haven't needed to ask the same questions - if only everyone was so diligent ;-)
If we do document this it needs to be done in a way that justifies our document schema since the move to XHTML is not underway yet.
The argument is just as valid for our current format, the move to a subset of XHTML2 is only to enable us to leverage emerging XHTML2 editors. When Forrest started XHTML2 was unspecified and XHTML1 was too close to HTML in that it had lots of tags that were being misused to denote style. Since, XHTML2 is modular we can opt not to use those elements and it appears to be mature enough to actually use in a production system.
Ross
