- From: J. Graham <jg307@hermes.cam.ac.uk>
- Date: Tue, 30 Aug 2005 10:18:51 +0100 (BST)
On Mon, 29 Aug 2005, Brad Neuberg wrote: >> Most of these problems affect you, only if you were >> forced to develop >> XHTML pages (which you are most likely not). > > A very vociferous XHTML community has developed the > last few years that essentially does force developers > to use XHTML, at least publicly. Using XHTML is > currently considered a best practice; I'm trying to > voice that I believe it is not. If you're referring to "XHTML-the-brand" (i.e. anything with an XHTML doctype sent as text/html), I'm sure you'll find widespread agreement here that such practice is, at best useless, and probably "harmful" (although I should parenthetically note that XHTML-the-brand was sold to the masses by Zeldman as the new markup of a CSS generation. Maybe without the marketing hook we'd still have a lot more people using nested tables and 1px spacer gifs). Indeed Ian wrote a well publicised document explaining why sending "XHTML" as text/html is "harmful" [1]. On the other hand I doubt that you'll get much agreement that XHTML is intrinsically a worse technology than HTML. I personally doubt it will ever be a success on the web because I think the monetary and social costs of switching organisations to an all-XML backend are immense (without knowing anything at all about the products I would bevery surprised if even the latest cool CMS's like Ruby on Rails and Django used even XML templating systems by default. But such a thing is really required for XHTML). Having said that, your dismissal of compond documents as "simply not well supported" ignores the fact that people are already using these technologies to good effect. Compare [2] and [3] the first of which uses XHTML+MathML and the second of which uses HTML+gifs to present documents containing a significant quantity of mathematics. Once you have the required fonts installed, the MathML document offers faster load times (one request rather than dozens), improved accessibility (equations scale with the text! A screenreader has a hope!) and an all round better user experience. Who is XHTML harming here? Anyway, to conclude, if you have specific suggestions for features that will remove the need for horrible kludges like document.write that's probably more useful than a list of 8 general areas 4 of which are technical, 2 of which are critical of implementations and 2 merely political. [1] http://www.hixie.ch/advocacy/xhtml [2] http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/~distler/blog/archives/000635.html [3] http://www.qinfo.org/people/nielsen/blog/?p=229
Received on Tuesday, 30 August 2005 02:18:51 UTC