Re: Netscape 6 support for XML

"Martin Honnen" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
>
>
> Jack wrote:
>
>
> > This does make me doubt the extent to which XHTML
> > served as XML is suopported by older browsers. According to W3C, one of
the
> > main advantages of  XHTML over HTML is that it allows you to define your
own
> > entities. If external DTDs are not loaded by some User Agents, then it
is
> > obviously going to be more difficult to do this.
>
> Let's face it, XHTML 1.0 semantically has nothing to offer compared to
> HTML 4.01, HTML 4.01 is a SGML application and XHTML 1.0 is a
> reformulation as an XML application so on the web in general as long as
> you are looking for the functionality of HTML 4.01 use it and not it
> XHTML 1.0, with HTML 4.01 and text/html you get much better support in
> the user agents.
> XML and then XHTML as a consequence have been introduced to reduce the
> complexity of SGML and SGML parsers, where on the web in a browser the
> HTML parsers were and are not simply strict SGML parsers but "tag soup"
> parsers trying to deal with any markup thrown at them and to "correct"
> and interpret it in a way to render it. X(HT)ML does no longer require
> that, if some XHTML is not well-formed XML then the page doesn't have to
> be rendered, it suffices to show a parse error message. Thus if someone
> only has to build an XHTML renderer he can use an XML parser or build
> one and end up with much slimmer software compared to existing browsers.
> Only existing browsers can not give up on text/html HTML tag soup
> parsing but have to offer both worlds currently and while Opera and
> Mozilla have put effort in XML and XHTML support it has certainly taken
> time and releases to get it going. So you are right, XHTML as XML with
> older browsers (or perhaps older releases of the newly designed and
> created browsers such as Netscape 6 or early Opera 7) is certainly not
> something to rely on.
> Still, as said above, XHTML 1.0 doesn't help you, where XHTML makes
> sense in my view is when it comes to mixing XHTML with other languages
> in different namespaces, for instance Mozilla has XHTML plus MathML
> support and that is certainly something worth looking at XML and XHTML.
> (But don't bother with trying that with Netscape 6, you need at least
> Mozilla 1.4 or Netscape 7.1 then).

HTML is better supported for desktop & laptop computers, but I understand
for PDAs and 3G mobile phones you need to render web pages as XML.

>
>
> > I tried entering the acute-accented vowels using Notepad. Unfortunately
> > these are displayed as question marks in Netscape 6.2 (but if you use
IE6 to
> > look at the source you cansee the accented vowels). See
> >
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/r.a.mccartney/test/test_file_for_utf-8_accents_without_entities.xml
>
> I have loaded that page with Netscape 7.2, Opera 7.50 and IE 6 and I
> think there is no fault with the two browsers named first not rendering
> accents, the XML declaration says it is UTF-8 but I don't think it is.
> Indeed trying to parse the page with MSXML 4, Microsoft's XML parser,
> gives an error
>    "An invalid character was found in text content."
> for line 15.
>
> So you need to make sure you are really creating your page as UTF-8,
> then I am sure Mozilla 1.0 and later (or Netscape 7.0 and later) can
> handle accented characters. No promise about Netscape 6, it is too long
> ago to remember details about its XML and UTF-8 support and I don't have
> it to test here, but I would be suprised if a simple XML page properly
> encoded and declared as UTF-8 would cause problems.
>

I had an exchange in another thread about this. I'm using Notepad to create
web pages in Ascii. Some one assured me that Ascii is a subset of Unicode,
so there shouldn't be a problem. Is that incorrect?, If so, can anyone
recommend a free Win 98 application which creates Unicode files?