Hallvord R. M. Steen

Microsoft's vista of tag soup

Monday, September 19, 2005 9:37:34 PM

Now when Microsoft has been preaching interoperability gospels and collaborates with the WASP you would be forgiven for assuming that some of that attitude might reach those who develop Microsoft websites.

I'm sorry, but I have a disappointment for you: run the new MS Vista presentation through the W3C validator and admire the error output. And what's up in Opera? The site renders like a mess.

Opera's problem is one single curious and invalid tag: <xhtml xmlns="http://www.microsoft.com/MSCOM/MNP2/Schemas"> stuck in the middle of the code. This changes to a different XML namespace and makes Opera ignore the following LINK tag which references most of the prettifying styles.

Why? I don't know Opera's source code. Perhaps Opera tries to handle what it thinks is a compound document? Compound documents are the most exciting part of the XHTML promises. This page isn't a compound document though, and it isn't even XHTML, so Opera should strive to ignore any indications of the opposite.

In what browser can you enumerate navigator.plugins?"Tested only in FireFox" signature error

Comments

Jonny Axelssonjax # Wednesday, September 21, 2005 12:31:30 AM

Damn, that was some truly ugly code. Yes that make-believe 'xhtml' element set default namespace for itself and its content to something very much not HTML, in other words arbitrary non-sensical XML. However, as you said, the document was served as text/html. XML namespaces obviously applies to XML, but does it apply to SGML HTML too? Around Opera 8.0 we decided it did not, so we should have ignored the xmlns attribute.