[Zope3-dev] Re: XML header and TAL interpretor

[Philipp von Weitershausen]

Fred Drake wrote:
> On 8/31/05, Philipp von Weitershausen <philipp at weitershausen.de> wrote:
> 
>>HTML4 mode exists because
> 
> ...
> 
>>- it enforces some HTML document type (as mentioned before); no idea why
>>it does that
> 
> 
> I'm just guessing you're referring to its understanding of the allowed
> nesting structures.

Indeed.

> This is done so that the partial well-formedness
> it requires mixed with the careless infliction of pain commonly
> performed by old-style HTML authors produces as few surprises as
> possible.  The only well-formedness it directly enforces is for
> elements that actually have TAL, METAL, and I18N attributes.  Whether
> this was the right thing to do is debatable.
> 
> Another reason for the HTML mode is that many of the HTML editors
> deployed when we first developed TAL were not generating XHTML, and
> weren't expected to do so in the immediate future.  We definately
> wanted page templates to be editable in WYSIWYG-type editors.

I'm not at all questioning your reasoning of inventing HTML mode in the
first place. I think it was definitely useful and a reasonable solution
at the time. Now it's just in our way, at least in Julien's, mine, and
other people's who have been bitten by the
XML-macros-not-compatible-with-HTML-macros feature.

Philipp