Re: The HTML Element

AH> Like I said, unless you come up with some actual *reason* or *purpose*
AH> for changing the name of the root element, it is only a novelty. If a
AH> web developer needs a root element to tell him he's writing XHTML,
AH> then I think he needs to go read a few more tutorials.

When XHTML 2.0 comes out, the MIME type application/xhtml+xml will
correspond to two formats, XHTML 1.x which is HTML 4.0 based, and a
substantially different HTML variant.

<xhtml> tells user agents that this is not your father's <html>, prepare for
a document divided into <section>s and <h>s, for a document where every
element can have href and src attributes, that we're going to a foreign land
where <meta> isn't an empty tag but a container.

The DOCTYPE won't be XHTML 2.0's when it's an XHTML document
embedded in another XML format like SVG.

If we're not going to be backward compatible with what <html> normally
signifies, it's safer and saner to change the root tag to <xhtml>. Otherwise
naive user agents that don't look at namespaces may try to make sense of it
as if it were HTML.

Received on Monday, 30 June 2003 17:41:55 UTC