Posted by Grant Robertson on 03/14/07 22:56

I should give some more details about my system. I am working on a
standard for marking up educational material, as I mentioned in my
original post. This material will be designed to be distributed or
downloaded to an individual student's hard drive. It will then be "served
up" and displayed by software on the user's computer. I want the desktop
software to be able to use unmodified browser code to display the
content. This is why it will be XML files with XHTML for the content to
be displayed. The software will look through the XML file for the
particular XHTML content it wants to display. Granted, I could use any
darn file format I want. However, I want to encourage lots of people to
contribute content so I want it to be in standard XHTML so people don't
have to learn anything new.

This content will be very, very modularized and I want to be able to
replace an image in the content with another image or even a snipit of
MathML or a flash applet or whatever without ever having to modify the
original content that refers to it. This way people can submit content
with lame scanned sketches for pictures and others who are more
graphically inclined can submit improved versions of these pictures. Or
someone with no software for entering equations as MathML can submit a
scan of an equation and someone else can enter that as MathML so it will
look better.

Therefore, I can't rely on ANY features of any web server software.
Though it would be OK to require the desktop software to emulate those
features if necessary. All I am concerned with at this time is: Is there
a way to indicate a generically named resource within XHTML code and have
that code still be legal. If someone were using any standard, modern web
design software to design this small hunk of XHTML content would it let
them do it at all? Would it fail to display anything, or would it give an
error?

I know these are very nonstandard questions but this is a very
nonstandard situation where I am trying to use as many existing standards
as possible. I also know I could probably answer these questions myself
if I had time to teach myself web design but I am a little pressed for
time these days with school and this standard that I am trying to work
out.

I do appreciate any help you all can give.


In article <et75da$5j7$2$8302bc10@news.demon.co.uk>, dorward@yahoo.com
says...
> > I don't know much about XHTML. I am trying to design an XML standard
> > where content authors can use HTML or XHTML for the content within an
> > element.
>
> That isn't possible - unless the HTML is going to be entered in CDATA
> sections or encoding with character references.

I know that XHTML can be used as content within an XML file. I have no
problem requiring that HTML be enclosed within CDATA tags. XML and HTML
developers are used to this already.



> > Within the above mentioned XHTML content I want authors to be able to
> > insert an href to refer to a graphic without knowing what file type that
> > graphic will be.
>
> href="http://www.example.com/foo/someImage"
>
> ... and then the server can deliver up whatever you like.

Would "someimage" be a folder name? Or is it legal within XHTML to refer
to a resource without specifying a full, specific file name.


> > I want them to be able to point instead to a separate
> > list of alternative files and the first file in the list will be
> > displayed if possible. If the browser can't display that first file then
> > it will try the next until it finds one it can display.
>
> <object data="foo.gif" type="image/gif">
> <object data="foo.jpeg" type="image/jpeg">
> <object data="foo.png" type="image/png">
> <object data="foo.svg" type="image/svg+xml">
> <p>Alternative content.</p>
> </object>
> </object>
> </object>
> </object>
>
> ... has been fine since HTML 4.0 ... shame about the browser support though.

Where would I put this snipit of code? Would this go in the separate file
I was referring to? What would the whole file look like? How, then, would
I refer to this file within the original XHTML content? What is this
technique called so I can look it up on my own?

It doesn't matter about the browser support. I can require that the
desktop software perform a transformation of sorts to dynamically modify
the href attribute just before it sends it to the browser part of their
program. The dynamically modified XHTML content would then merely refer
to a specific file and the browser part would be none the wiser. I just
want to make sure that the XHTML code, as it sits in the original
content, is legal.

If I had to, I guess I could make up my own standard for the way the
separate list is formatted since the only software reading it is the same
software that is reading my XML file. However, I want to use as many
existing standard methods as possible so developers will be able to use
as much existing code as possible. By making it easy to design software
to my standard, I hope to encourage lots of competition in creating
software that works with the standard.

Again, I really appreciate any help anyone can give me.

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