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

[Philipp von Weitershausen]

Tonico Strasser wrote:
> Fred Drake schrieb:
> 
>> 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.  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.
> 
> And, as long pages are served as text/html they are treated as old-style
> HTML by browsers anyway[1].
> 
> XHTML pages served as text/html must follow the compatibility
> guidelines[2]. E.g. in ZPT HTML mode, elements like <br/> will be
> converted to <br /> automagically (with space before the slash). That is
> a good thing IMHO.

I'm not so sure that this is such a good thing. ZPT seems to enforce
*guidelines* that not everyone might want to follow (e.g. if I want to
output my XHTML as c14n or something similar). For me, ZPT's HTML mode
just does too many things, most of which won't hurt to be the template
author's responsibility. I definitely consider <br/> vs. <br /> one of them.

Philipp