Re: XHTML

On Fri, 19 Mar 1999, Xavier Plantefeve wrote:

> HTML 4.0 works fine and will continue to work fine, mind you: HTML
> 1.0 is currently perfectly rendered by both Gecko & IE5.

LOL!!!

In the earliest surviving HTML spec, one finds:

#   Highlighting 
#   The highlighted phrase tags may occur in normal text, and may be
#   nested. For each opening tag there must follow a corresponding
#   closing tag.
#                <HP1>...</HP1>   <HP2>... </HP2> etc.

I'd like to see IE5 grok that.
   
Oh, and in an update to that spec, one finds:

#  TYPEWRITER  
#  
#  The TYPEWRITER element is used for characters that have already
#  been formatted for a typewriter-like device. Markup is recognized
#  in this element just as in the normal body paragraphs. But after
#  processing tags and entity references, the data is displayed as on
#  a typewriter, rather than using typesetting conventions.

I am not aware of any browser that supports _that_ element.

What about all the other HTML stuff that they don't support or support
incorrectly: collapsing empty P elements, the LINK element, the "alt"
attribute, comments, RS/RE around tags, nesting UL in a DL in an OL...

No, I think it would be more accurate to say that "HTML 4.0 works fine
and will continue to work fine, mind you: HTML 1.0 is currently
rendered tolerably well by both Gecko & IE5".

Thankfully, most of these problems will probably be _correctly_
implemented in XHTML browsers, since at that stage it just becomes a
case of correctly parsing XML, which is easier than SGML.

-- 
Ian Hickson 
U+2642 U+2651
U+262E U+2603 U+263A

Received on Thursday, 18 March 1999 18:48:47 UTC