Re: Serving XHTML as XML

On Thu, 24 Feb 2005 08:21:34 +0100, Jesper Tverskov
<jesper.tverskov@mail.tele.dk> wrote:
> W3C uses XHTML as text/html on their homepage and for "HTML Validator",
> "CSS Validator", "Quality Assurance at W3C", and for hundreds of other
> webpages at their website.

The W3C web pages are no paragon of virtue, and are certainly not
examples of great web-authoring techniques - they're freed from having
to actually deliver results to their customers - they have no
customers.

> They would probably only do that because XHTML served as text/html poses
> close to no problems to any browser in the real world, and have not done
> so for several years.

However it gives huge QA jobs, because you can't rely on formal
validation, but have to rely on "what works" because all valid XHTML
can't be served as text/html, People may feel that they have the QA
and the accessibility and the product marketing and the development
resources to use XHTML send as text/html, but those of us in the real
world would rather leave validating are our mark-up to what can be
mechanically tested so we can use our valuable human QA and
development time on more important accessibility problems.

There is simply nothing wrong with HTML 4.01, and example descriptions
like the ones on smackthemouse earlier in the thread which
specifically encourage people to violate RFC 2616 are terrible, stop
encouraging people to break standards.

Jim.

Received on Thursday, 24 February 2005 09:20:02 UTC