Subject: More thouhts on PaceXhtmlNamespaceDiv

From: Anne van Kesteren <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2005 12:34:34 +0100

There is only a single way in which a required DIV element in
|type="XHTML"| would be useful. It would only be useful if the XHTML
namespace was defined directly on the DIV element, like:

  <atom:entry>
   <div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
    ...
   </div>
  </atom:entry>

The DIV element would obviously not be considered part of the content
and all the elements inside the DIV element should inherit the XHTML
namespace and should not have a namespace prefix.

Than it would be possible to easy copy and paste and easily generate it
from string-generators, like MovableType and WordPress.

However, this would seriously limit |type="XHTML"| and would require the
Atom specification to define the DTD for the allowed XHTML elements.
Since you can use MathML and SVG in a valid way inside the DIV element
as well, with the proper DTD. For some people that is quite normal[1].

IMHO it would be better if your system can not guarentee to generate
well-formed XHTML it would use |type="HTML"|. That is also interoperable
and can be easily copy and pasted. I think we should recommend that to
publishers instead of limiting |type="XHTML"|.

However, if we do want to limit |type="XHTML"| in this way we should do
in a way that makes it useful. By defining the DTD and the exact way the
namespace declarations should happen.

[1]<http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/~distler/blog/>

-- 
  Anne van Kesteren
  <http://annevankesteren.nl/>