Re: type attribute (Re: Site Maps and nested navigation)

On Wed, Dec 07, 2005 at 05:05:37PM +0100, Ricci Angela wrote:

> 	Please, correct me if I'm wrong... I've been developping web
> applications in XHTML for some time now and, although I'm aware of
> the pros and cons of serving my pages as text/html, I still think it
> may be the right choice because :

> 	- I believe my pages are much more evolutive (even if I'll
> have to re-work some aspects, my pages will be readier when user
> agents will be capable to support them as application/xhtml+xml)

What advantages would serving as application/xhtml+xml bring you over
text/html? 

Today? None, most likely.

In the future? Who can say. I wouldn't bet on there being any (So
browser foo supports XHTML - what does that matter if it also supports
HTML, and HTML does everything you need?), but if there are then
converting from HTML to XHTML programmatically is trivial (and even
more so if you write HTML with all CSS and JavaScript in external
files).

> 	- XHTML is the natural evolution of HTML4

The WHATWG disagree. 

> 	I've created some reflexes writting in XHTML, and I believe
> they will avoid me a lot of re-work in the future and make my pages
> live longer.

There is /lots/ of HTML out there, and even more /bad/ HTML. User
agent support for it is not likely to go away (and as I said,
converting HTML to XHTML is not a lot of work).

For that matter, if you really believe that XHTML is the future, then
there is nothing stopping you writing XHTML today ... but serving HTML
to clients (which is what I do - although that's more due to me having
a lot of data in XHTML format as a legacy from the time when I used
XHTML without understanding the implications).

-- 
David Dorward                                      http://dorward.me.uk

Received on Wednesday, 7 December 2005 16:16:07 UTC