Spartanicus,

> Whether or not that includes 
> XHTML 2 is unclear to me given the presence of legacy 
> elements such as <img> apparently for reasons of backward 
> compatibility.

Are you sure you have seen that somewhere, or just assuming that this is the
motivation? I don't think that anyone has said that using <img> is to do
with backwards compatibility.

<img> is a bit like <a> in that sometimes an author wants to insert an image
in a document, and it just *is* an image (or a link, in the case of <a>). In
other words, it's not a list item that is represented by an image, or a
heading that is represented by an image, it's just an image. (If it was a
heading, for example, then <h src="..." etc.> would be a better choice for
the author.)

When you establish a feature that people feel is desirable, the next
question is obviously going to be, what should this tag be called? It could
be called something new like <image>, or it could re-use an old name, like
<img>. Questions like, 'does it do the same job as the old tag', are
relevant here, as is evaluating whether there is 'mindshare' that can be
leveraged. In the case of <img> I think it is clear that there is a lot of
mindshare in using the current name, and that both behaviour and semantics
are pretty much the same.

But *none* of this has anything to do with backwards compatibility.

Regards,

Mark


Mark Birbeck
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