Re: Bug in Meta handling

At 08:23 PM 12/24/2000 , hutch@psfc.mit.edu wrote:
>What puzzles me, though, is that <br /> <hr /> <img /> etc are in fact not
>complained about by the validator AFAIK, whereas <meta /> is. 

I'm not sure why that is.  I'll test it myself.

>As for XHTML/HTML, are you seriously saying that W3C has adopted a
>standard for the "next generation of HTML", namely XHTML, that is
>incompatible with HTML in both directions? (In other words neither
>standard can parse documents expressed in any useful subset of the
>other). If this is really so, then what on earth are they up to?

Yes, they've adopted a standard which is basically what you say.

What they're up to is a migration to XML.

The XHTML compatibility appendix is based on observations on how
existing browsers work -- it's not really a normative "this is how
to write backwards compatible XHTML."  It's just a "this is how to
write XHTML that won't break the old browsers, because they ignore
confusing HTML tags and elements and stuff."

There's a definite sense in XHTML of leaving the past behind --
witness the fact that many valid HTML 4.0 files are invalid XHTML
not because of closed tags or the like, but more often because of
the "case" of tags.

Whether or not this forced upgrade to XHTML is a good thing is
still to be seen.  A version of HTML which can be parsed/created
by XML tools is useful to me in my work with XSLT and the like;
however, the actual benefits of XHTML really do remain to be
seen.  (Modularization is much touted but I honestly believe that's
a false "silver bullet.")

--Kynn

-- 
Kynn Bartlett  <kynn@idyllmtn.com>                    http://kynn.com/
Sr. Engineering Project Leader, Reef-Edapta       http://www.reef.com/
Chief Technologist, Idyll Mountain Internet   http://www.idyllmtn.com/
Contributor, Special Edition Using XHTML     http://kynn.com/+seuxhtml
Unofficial Section 508 Checklist           http://kynn.com/+section508

Received on Monday, 25 December 2000 04:28:39 UTC