Re: HTML 4.x or XHTML for accessibility

Amaya does parse XHTML as XHTML if it is served correctly. If there is an
error, it offers the choice of giving up, parsing as HTML, or showing the
errors - because it is an editor as well as a browser you can fix the errors
for local use, and save the repaired version.

Letting people edit pages with a text editor is something I really shy away
from. There are plenty of tools that can cope with generating correct markup,
or correcting it on demand, and even simple source-editing tools can
show validation errors.

The price of accepting invalid code is eventually paid by end users in having
to buy more powerful computers to run more complex browsers with more
unreliable results, and by designers who spend extra time dealing with the
lack of reliability - and pass on those costs.

chaals

On Tue, 18 Jun 2002, Tom Gilder wrote:


  On Tuesday, June 18, 2002, 10:24:23 AM, Andrew McFarland wrote:
  > > My most serious concern regarding xhtml, and xml (and this future), is
  > > that code that has errors will not be rendered
  >
  > Surely this is a good thing?

  For web standards? Yes.
  For end users? No.

  If a page has a small error (and they do creep in from time-to-time, especially
  if you let other people edit a page), then giving the user an error would be
  very annoying.

  This won't happen in the short term as most XHTML is sent as text/html, so will
  still be sent through HTML4 parsers.

  I feel browsers should detect XHTML, and parse it through an XML parser. If that
  errors, tell the user there's an error but then still attempt to parse it
  through a HTML4 parser.



-- 
Charles McCathieNevile    http://www.w3.org/People/Charles  phone: +61 409 134 136
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative     http://www.w3.org/WAI  fax: +33 4 92 38 78 22
Location: 21 Mitchell street FOOTSCRAY Vic 3011, Australia
(or W3C INRIA, Route des Lucioles, BP 93, 06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France)

Received on Tuesday, 18 June 2002 05:49:59 UTC