Re: Questions about XHTML

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Clint Brooks <CBROOKS@nwacc.cc.ar.us> wrote:

>I was wondering if someone could provide me with some technical
>information on the XHTML standard.

You raise many good points and I would suggest you take it up on the
<www-html@w3.org> mailinglist where it is more appropriate (there they discuss
the standards current and future; here we try to limit ourselves to
interpreting and validating the standards that exists regardless of
provenance).


I will say this though; your complaints may be more to do with what appears an
arbitrary change then the specific details of that change. For instance,
"closing" img and br do not really cause you any great effort; they are still
just "magic syntax" that you put in because "that's the way it's written". If
you do not elect to migrate your existing content to XHTML you do not need to
do this, and if you do choose to migrate to XHTML, this is a once off
operation.

As for proper nesting, such as <p></p>, it can actually be viewed as an
optimization for browsers; they no longer need to infer the proper place to
close the <p> as they have needed to before.

Rest assured that the changes which you worry are leading towards a web where
you are dependant on (possibly expensive) tools are anything but. In fact, the
complete opposite is true; the "cleanup" is a move _away_ from reliance on
proprietary vendor's tools.


There is a very long-winded technical explanation for the misunderstanding --
which I'll spare you :-) -- but which you may wish to seek in the available
documentation. Most of the concerns you raise specifically are addressed by
this.

However, the issues you raise imply a more abstract issue; namely the
impedance between what properties made the web so successfull in the first
place (i.e. its relative "sloppyness") and what we are heading towards, and
have been heading towards.

I think that is an issue worth exploring, regardless that I do not think I
would in the end agree with you on it.


In any case, this is better discussed on www-html than here.



- -- 
> I suggest you attend some sort of anger management class....
That's where you learn to upset the PHBs? -- Peter da Silva

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Received on Saturday, 7 June 2003 11:47:55 UTC