No convergence

It seems that what I am try­ing to do will not work. The con­cept of try­ing to mix RSS with XHTML seems to be flawed, as illus­trated by the W3C feed. While it does val­i­date as proper RSS, it fails mis­er­ably when it comes to val­i­dat­ing as an XHTML doc­u­ment. This brings up an inter­est­ing point in try­ing to cre­ate files that are mod­u­lar and can be used in mul­ti­ple name spaces. If XHTML is truly a mod­u­lar lan­guage, then the assump­tion would be that it would be pos­si­ble to have it val­i­date as a proper web page by ref­er­enc­ing the proper XHTML name­space. How­ever, it does not seem to be so.

The prob­lem arises out of the need for a DTD to be spec­i­fied as part of the XHTML core struc­ture. The same prob­lem exists in XHTML 2 which could be a prob­lem mov­ing for­ward. What is needed is for XHTML to chuck this depen­dency and rely solely on name­spaces for the pur­pose of estab­lish­ing con­ven­tions. After all, if an XHTML 2 doc­u­ment is refor­mu­la­tion of HTML in XML, why would it need a DOCTYPE ? If it con­tin­ues doing so, it could jeop­ar­dize its mod­u­lar­ity and will not allow for HTML to con­verge with other XML for­mats. Since the goal of the XHTML 2 work­group has been to rein­vent HTML, why did they make that deci­sion? This is a prob­lem that needs to be addressed before the full spec­i­fi­ca­tion actu­ally comes out.