W3C XHTML Basic 1.1 Implementation Report

The XHTML Basic document type includes the minimal set of modules required to be an XHTML host language document type, and in addition it includes images, forms, basic tables, and object support. It is designed for Web clients that do not support the full set of XHTML features; for example, Web clients such as mobile phones, PDAs, pagers, and settop boxes. The document type is rich enough for content authoring.

XHTML Basic is designed as a common base that may be extended. The goal of XHTML Basic is to serve as a common language supported by various kinds of user agents.

This revision, 1.1, supercedes version 1.0 as defined in http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/REC-xhtml-basic-20001219. In this revision, several new features have been incorporated into the language in order to better serve the small-device community that is this language's major user:

  1. XHTML Forms (defined in [XHTMLMOD])
  2. Intrinsic Events (defined in [XHTMLMOD])
  3. The value attribute for the li element (defined in [XHTMLMOD])
  4. The target attribute (defined in [XHTMLMOD])
  5. The style element (defined in [XHTMLMOD])
  6. The style attribute (defined in [XHTMLMOD])
  7. XHTML Presentation module (defined in [XHTMLMOD])
  8. The inputmode attribute (defined in Section 5 of the document)

The document type definition is implemented using XHTML modules as defined in "XHTML Modularization" [XHTMLMOD].

Since XHTML Basic 1.1 is almost entirely a subset of full XHTML, all of the features of XHTML Basic 1.1 are widely implemented, with the exception of one (optional) feature taken over from XForms, namely the inputmode attribute. Therefore the CR period has been principally about waiting for implementations of that feature.

One implementation that we used to test the feature was an internal version of Netfront3 dated 2007-11-29. The test results of that test are to be found in the implementation test report (pdf).

The other implementation was the picoforms browser, which although it doesn't implement XHTML Basic 1.1, does implement the inputmode attribute on input and textarea elements. So we created an equivalent test, and ran it on picoforms on a Nokia telephone. The implementation passed the test (see screen shot).

Screen dump of picoforms test

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Roland Merrick, Steven Pemberton, Co-chairs W3C XHTML2 Working Group
Last updated: 2008-06-05