- From: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
- Date: Tue, 13 May 2008 09:37:39 +0000 (UTC)
On Sun, 11 Mar 2007, Bjoern Hoehrmann wrote: > * L. David Baron wrote: > >My dismissal of XHTML is that the designers of XHTML and related > >standards are repeatedly introducing more and more incompatibility > >between XHTML and HTML, which makes it progressively harder for > >authors to transition to XHTML (particularly to do so gradually on a > >large site). > > Out of curiosity, do you dismiss "HTML5" on the same grounds? As an > example, http://www.bjoernsworld.de/suchmaschinen/robots-txt.html is > as close as it comes to a proper HTML document, but to turn it into > a HTML5 document I would need to make many non-trivial changes, e.g. > find replacements for > > * <link rev> We removed rev="" because it was only used correctly for one thing (rev=made) and was misused a _lot_, and the number of people using rel=author was comparable (I forget the exact numbers). > * <a name> This was removed purely to simplify the language. > * empty <a> elements Those are legal now. > * <hr size> > * <img align> > * <table align> > * <table width> > * <td align> Those should all be removed anyway to improve your content/style separation, which would aid with maintenance. (I'm assuming here that you'd want to transition the document only if it was a document in active development, in which case maintenance is relevant. If maintenance is not relevant, there's no reason to transition the document.) > * review whether I use any so-called predefined classes and if, > whether I use them correctly, or find out how to replace them These are gone now. > * review whether I am MicroformatsOK according to the latest > Wiki pages HTML5 doesn't require this any more than HTML4 now. > * review whether my img elements are really some piece of text > with some alternate graphical representation This you should do anyway for accessibility reasons. > * review whether my images are all the exact size given in the > height and width attributes This you should do anyway to obtain quality results. > and so on, whereas switching to XHTML would simply be a matter of > running HTML Tidy on all the files and lowercasing the selectors in the > style sheets? It's a lot of work if I just want to add my favourite > "HTML5" feature to the page. Well, that's what you get for using a "Transitional" markup language without intending to transition. :-) Note that moving to XHTML 1.1 would require many of the same changes, since it also omits the Transitional features. Cheers, -- Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,. Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
Received on Tuesday, 13 May 2008 02:37:39 UTC