[Zope3-dev] Re: .xpt extension for explicit xml processing

[Tonico Strasser]

> http://dev.zope.org/Zope3/BetterXMLSupportForPageTemplates

One comment on the section "Questioning HTML mode" in this document:

HTML mode is still useful for user agents that use a SGML parser instead 
of a XML parser and would break if they had to deal with real XML code. 
I know, such user agents are very rare, Netscape 4 comes into my mind. 
(If you want to make Netscape 4 burn just put a <br/> somewhere in the 
source).

Why does HTML mode help? It converts <foo/> to <foo />.

This behaviour is described in appendix C of the XHTML specs.

     "This appendix summarizes design guidelines for authors who wish
     their XHTML documents to render on existing HTML user agents."
     <http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/#guidelines>

MSIE is known to handle XHTML pretty well althought it doesn't use a XML 
parser. IE can deal with <br/> but it can't deal with <script/>. You 
have to write <script></script> for IE.

Here a quote from an artikle at Wikipedia:

     "Rather, XHTML 1.0 was intentionally designed to be usable by
     HTML 4.0 user agents, like Internet Explorer, if certain document
     authoring guidelines for backward compatibility were followed."
     <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticisms_of_Internet_Explorer#XHTML>

 From this information I come to the conclusion that it would be best to 
simply follow the compatibility guidlines in appendix C. HTML mode helps 
me to do this by inserting a space before the closing slash.

Just my two cents.

Tonico