XHTML and XML on the Web

A discussion has been raised on the ML with the argument that XML was  
not a success on the Web.
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-html/2006Aug/0015

The assertion could be true or completely wrong depending on how you  
define the Web, but it got me to look a bit further.


I found that an article about Government Web sites in China, and the  
tester found that none of them was actually valid.

[[[
The validation result

The validation result details shows that none of the tested sites use  
valid HTML. More worrying is that only one site is using headings. A  
common problem with the tested sites is that encoding has been used  
incorrectly.
]]]

-- Government Web Standards Usage: People's Republic of China -  
Standards-schmandards
http://www.standards-schmandards.com/index.php?2006/02/26/35-gvmt- 
standards-prc
Thu, 03 Aug 2006 10:33:16 GMT

The author reminds also that

[[[
Although tests of other countries have shown similar results (USA:  
2.4%, New Zealand: 5.7%) having no valid sites indicates the absence  
of a central policy for government web communication.
]]]

-- Government Web Standards Usage: People's Republic of China -  
Standards-schmandards
http://www.standards-schmandards.com/index.php?2006/02/26/35-gvmt- 
standards-prc
Thu, 03 Aug 2006 10:33:16 GMT

Björn Hörmann reminded me of the article of Mark Pilgrim
"XML on the Web Has Failed"
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2004/07/21/dive.html

which concludes by saying that 90% (being only a part of XML) of  
*feeds* were not XML. I don't want to draw a conclusion, but that 10%  
are actually XML.

Does that mean that XML does in fact better than HTML on the "Web"?


-- 
Karl Dubost - http://www.w3.org/People/karl/
W3C Conformance Manager, QA Activity Lead
   QA Weblog - http://www.w3.org/QA/
      *** Be Strict To Be Cool ***

Received on Friday, 4 August 2006 06:18:20 UTC