Re: Specifying mode in file variables trouble

[Lennart Borgman (gmail)]

Richard M. Stallman wrote:
>     For each of them I have one with html-mode as main mode and one with
>     nxhtml-mode as main mode.
> 
> Why is it necessary to have both?

There are currently to different major modes for handling XHTML files in
Emacs:

html-mode: This is based on sgml-mode. This is a "normal" major mode
where everything works ok with MuMaMo.

nxml-mode: This is James Clark's nXml mode which has DTD based
validation and completion for XML files. (DTD=Document Type Definition,
this describes what XML tags and attributes are allowed and where etc.)

nxhtml-mode is based on nxml-mode. I have added some more convenient
completion functions for XHTML files there. This is not part of Emacs. I
distribute it in the nXhtml package together with MuMaMo.

There are still some problems with the nxml-mode parser and multi major
modes. Most of the time it works well, but it is not perfect.


So there are two reasons:

- html-mode is included in Emacs, but nxhtml-mode is not.
- html-mode works ok with multi major modes, while there are some minor
(from a users perspective) glitches with how nxhtml-mode works with
multi major modes.