Re: [wsrp] [CR310] - Add doctype fields

[Michael Freedman <Michael.Freedman@oracle.com>]

Additional good questions that add to my reservation of adding this to MarkupParams.
 I think I would rather us begin to define well-known extensions for consumers/producers
to take advantage of if/when necessary.  Otherwise I worry the parameter
list will continue to grow over time as we find new use cases for additional
information.  [By the way, this was also at the root of my questions/concerns
about adding CC/PP]
     -Mike-

Rich Thompson wrote:

Interesting point, but one could easily argue this is an issue with what the framework makes available to the component rather than a general issue (i.e. that decision could be easily changed).

Thinking about this further led to the following questions:

1. Isn't this an html specific issue (i.e. doctype in addition to mimetype)? If so, that reduces its fundamental value to me.
2. Wasn't the introduction of several doctypes part of a recognition on the part of the html standardization group that a significant body of legacy web sites existed? Should this be carried forward into the WSRP-enabled portlet world, particularly in light of this quote from our Primer; "WSRP raises the bar of conformance for this standard in many respects for what constitutes a good or effective portlet implementation. The specification makes specific recommendations regarding markup fragment rules, representing state, ensuring security, etc., with an eye toward maximizing the usefulness and integrity of portlet services."? If WSRP is truly raising the bar, it seems advocating adherence to the strict doctype should be part of that.
3. Are there any problems if a portlet generates a fragment of "strict" html which gets included on a page with the transitional html doctype?

Rich

Michael Freedman <Michael.Freedman@oracle.com>

03/17/05 06:13 PM

To	wsrp@lists.oasis-open.org
cc
Subject	Re: [wsrp] [CR310] - Add doctype fields

I think the answer to whether the "consumer" knows the doctype is a qualified "no".  Take for example someone who wants to build portlet support into a generic application development platform.  The platform would expose a developer friendly API for using/manipulating consumer-side use of portlets and hide the gory details of communicating with [remotw wsrp] portlets.  In such an environment there is a clean and distinct separation between application code that describes the structural rendering of the a consumer response and any given component in that structure that provides a portion of the rendition.  Because doctype is likely just markup expressed in the page, such components may find it difficult if not impossible to determine what it is.  I.e. whereas you can get the locale, mimetype and characters set from a servlet response you can't get the doctype.
   -Mike-

Rich Thompson wrote:

This change request raises a couple of questions for me:
1. Will the Consumer always "know" the doctype for what will be returned to the user agent at the time it invokes getMarkup? I think the answer is "yes", but we should review this carefully.
2. Are there other characteristics of the aggregated page that the Portlet could make good use of? Currently we have locale, mime type and character set ... any others?

Rich

Subbu Allamaraju <subbu@bea.com>

02/02/2005 11:19 AM

To	wsrp@lists.oasis-open.org
cc
Subject	Re: [wsrp] [CR310] - Add doctype fields

For the reasoning, I meant to say

"Due to the legacy nature of web, some portal sites are designed to
generate either _strict_ or quirks mode HTML ..."

I missed "strict" in my request sent to Rich.

Subbu

Rich Thompson wrote:
>
> Document: Specification
> Requested by: Subbu Allamaraju
> Section: 6.1.9 MarkupParams Type
> Page: 31
> Old Text:
> New Text:
>
>     [O] string        doctype
>
>    - doctype: The value of the PUBLIC ID of the DOCTYPE declaration, if
> any, used by the Consumer. Consumers using legacy or strict style HTML
> may supply the DOCTYPE. Producers MAY honor such DOCTYPE while
> generating markup.
>
> Document: WSRP1.0
> Section: 5.1.10 MarkupType Type
> Page: 20
> Old Text:
> New Text:
>
>      [O] string      doctypes[]
>
>     - doctypes: An array of DOCTYPE declarations that the Portlet can
> support.
>
> Reasoning:
>
> Due to the legacy nature of web, some portal sites are designed to
> generate either or quirks mode HTML markup and expect browsers to
> interpret the markup accordingly. Browsers use the HTML DOCTYPE
> declaration to indicate browsers which mode to use. For example, the
> following DOCTYPE declaration can be used for strict interpretation:
>
> <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
>      "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
>
> During an earlier discussion, the following issues have been identified:
>
> a. Consumers do not know whether a portlet can generate markup in a
> given DOCTYPE.
> b. Portlets do not know what kind of DOCTYPE to expect.
>
> The above changes address these issues. Please note that, in order to
> preserve backwards compat, both these elements are optional, and the
> behavior is unspecified when the doctypes are not supplied by either side.


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