I wasn't even sure if browsers actually read the DTD to allow this to work.
The only thing that makes XHTML something slightly different from XML is it's DTD. Take away or alter this DTD and you no longer have XHTML, but rather (in my case) NFML. Both languages are XML based, but they have different semantic meanings for the same tags, if mine allows for <p>'s to contain lists.
The definition of "semantics" from dictionary.com is: "The study of relationships between signs and symbols and what they represent." So <p>'s represent paragraphs and <ul>'s represent unordered lists. Most people understand a paragraph to be a block of text, not a list, so if my interpretation is correct, making that change to a DTD would be detrimental to the semantics of the markup language.
Another problem with that is that the purpose of the XML-based XHTML (and WAP 2.0 which is a slightly stripped-down version of XHTML 1.1) is to allow for the display of the same documents across all kind of platforms and screen sizes. Making changes like that could harm XHTML's ability to achieve that goal as well, because the way XHTML behaves has taken years of tweaking and thought by a dedicated team.
In many ways it's similar to mutations in DNA
Except that mutations are random, but this is not. It is kind of like deciding we all start genetically engineering our children, some with 4 legs, some who are 11 feet tall , suddenly none of the standards, like doorways that are roughly 8-9 feet high, pants with 2 legs etc will work for the majority. It will breed chaos. Bizarre example, but I guess my point is that if we want to be changing the DTD's, we shouldn't be pretending it is still XHTML.
Nelson ------------------------------------------- Vancouver, BC www.nelsonford.net
On 29-Apr-04, at 3:11 PM, Mordechai Peller wrote:
Nelson Ford wrote:
I've seen more and more of this fiddling with DTD's lately, and I'm not sure it is a wise thing for us to be going off the standard...
This is and idea I've been toying with recently, and I wasn't even sure if browsers actually read the DTD to allow this to work. I should add that I had no intentions of raising the dead, but rather, I wanted to fix something I see as a minor failing in XHTML in order to increase the semantic value of my markup. What I wanted to do is allow <ol>s and <ul>s inside <p>s, and then style the list as {display:inline}. But even if left at block level, there are time when it would still increase the symantic value.
It is, as you put it a "can of worms." In many ways it's similar to mutations in DNA: for every harmless mutation, never mind the even rarer beneficial ones, there are many thousands of harmful ones. (One of the problem with Hypothesis of Natural Selection [it's not a theory since it makes no predictions which have been verified], but I'm guessing that that discussion might be slightly off topic.)
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