- From: Jim Ley <jim@jibbering.com>
- Date: Thu, 2 Oct 2003 21:44:15 -0000
- To: <public-evangelist@w3.org>
"Brian Kelly" <b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk> > I understand your (and Jim's) rationale. I got the impression at the > WWW 2003 conference that the problem with dodgy XHTML was to be addressed > with XHTML 2.0. Getting a new markup language out won't solve the problem of dodgy XHTML, dodgy XHTML is a user problem, not a standards problem - developers have little incentive to author XHTML valid pages, as there's virtually no cost in authoring invalid ones. We can only change this behaviour by providing real benefits in the valid. As I see there's 2 options to this, ensure that new UA's don't render invalid XHTML - this is completely unrealistic, UA's need to render content that aren't 100% right, planes don't stop flying just because the lock on the toilet door doesn't work. Alternatively the UA's can indicate that it's used some form of fixup, perhaps by not using the users stylesheet or something that provides the content, whilst still making it clear it's not right. Whatever we choose we'll only be able to deploy these new User Agents against application/xhtml+xml, text/html is lost - that means tag-soup, and because of that we have to ensure that there's not a large userbase of invalid XHTML ready to be dumped on this unsuspecting XHTML ua - if there is, that UA will have to render it, or people won't use it. > BTW the reason I'm using XHTML 1.0 is > (1) to gain experience of problems - as I'm now finding; > (2) to be able to use XSLT to transform This is a good reason, but we can still present HTML from XHTML sources, it's just an extra publishing step, this may be too much trouble, but then I don't find XHTML meets my needs as a storage format in any case - I'd rather go RSS->HTML than XHTML->RSS, keeping the storage in the richer semantic format. Jim.
Received on Thursday, 2 October 2003 17:45:44 UTC