Re: Strategic decision time

Henry S. Thompson writes:

> Ian Hickson writes:
> 
> > The cost of aria: is that it puts up a huge barrier for migration
> > from HTML to XML, thus reducing the value of the XML universe.
> 
> That's the second time someone has said this.  Please explain.

Apologies if I've misunderstood, but I got the impression from elsewhere
in the thread that if the colon is used then the CSS selector syntax for
it would be different in XHTML from HTML.

That is, if I migrate a page from HTML to XHTML, I also have to make CSS
changes.  That's a barrier.

Also, much XHTML will work if served as text/html (and interpreted as
HTML; it won't validate, but browsers will render it correctly).  But
not if CSS changes are required -- that's a barrier.  In theory people
should always serve content using the correct media type.  But in
practice sometimes they get that wrong.

Currently XHTML is generally served as text/html; it'd be nice to get to
a stage where XHTML is served as XML.  But during the transition there'd
be lots of both around -- and having different behaviours in each (even
just requiring different CSS) is a barrier.

Smylers

Received on Thursday, 29 May 2008 14:02:30 UTC