- From: Bob Clary <bc@bclary.com>
- Date: Mon, 22 Sep 2003 11:23:58 -0400
- To: public-evangelist@w3.org
- Message-ID: <3F6F140E.8090602@bclary.com>
Richard Ishida wrote:
>
>
> [4] Jeffrey Zeldman posits that its easier to author repurposable text
> (eg. to be used on browsers but also mobile phones, pda's and other
> specialised user agents) if xhtml is used. I don't know if this is true
> (but I don't see any harm in using xhtml, just in case).
>
I spent over two years contacting major web sites and web developers
around the world trying to educate them about authoring according to the
W3C Standards. I know from experience how they will respond to comments
that their sites work in Internet Explorer due to bugs in Internet
Explorer and do not work in standards compliant browsers:
"It works in IE. Why doesn't your browser follow the standards set by IE?"
Besides non-standard script and invalid markup, examples which are still
rampant on the web today include invalid SGML comments and inappropriate
MIME types being reported by servers. I can show numerous examples in
the Mozilla Tech Evangelism project to show the inability or
unwillingness of sites to author correct HTML or to even configure
servers correctly.
HTML is a lost cause, however XHTML still has a future as a useful,
well-defined markup language _unless_ you succeed in redefining support
for XHTML to be whatever IE supports.
A perfect example of what is happening:
<http://www.zeldman.com/>
served as text/html with doc type
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
contains
<style type="text/css">
<!--
#secondarytop a:visited {
font-weight: normal;
background: #c60;
color: #fff;
text-decoration: none;
}
ul.inny {
margin-top: 0;
margin-left: 0;
padding-left: 0;
}
.inny li {
display: inline;
padding-right: 6px;
padding-left: 6px;
border-right: 1px solid #ccc;
}
li.first {
padding-left: 0;
}
li.last {
border-right: none;
}
-->
</style>
which will be ignored by any browser that supports application/xhtml+xml
if the page is served as such.
If and when IE ever does support application/xhtml+xml then I will bet
dimes to donuts that it will still apply these rules insteading of
ignoring them at it should.
If your goal is to allow the dominant, monopolist browser which will not
receive major updates to it's standards support for the next 2-4 years
(if ever) to define XHTML as tag-soup HTML and destroy any browser that
attempts to support the standards strictly, then your approach should work.
/bc
Received on Monday, 22 September 2003 11:24:39 UTC