Re: XHTMl

At 11:03 18/03/99 -0500, Nico Schottelius wrote:
>Good morning boys and girls...
>
>"XHTML ?" asked my friend "why should
>I need that ? I am doin HTML 3.2 right now, and it
>is really enough for me!"
...
>Also there is the problem of incompatibilty
>to old browsers.

Nir: This is incorrect. The xhtml working draft has guidelines for writing
backward compatible xhtml documents. I replaced some of my HTML4.0 pages
with xhtml1.0, and they render exactly the same as before on HTML3.2
browsers such as Netscape3.x, Opera3.x and Lynx2.7.x 

>Just one thing you should never do:
>Following a M$ standard makes you incompatibel
>to other systems.
>
>As I saw it in HTML 4.0 you took many tags
>from the IE into the specification, which
>only IE understands.
>This is not very good for us, the Linux, Amiga, BeOS, UN*X
>Apple & Co. user.
>

Nir: You are mixing several things here. 
First, there is nothing in the HTML4.0 specification that makes it better
implmentable on Windows operating systems than on other operating systems.

As of the second issue, of adopting "tags from IE", it should be pointed
out that HTML4.0 as opposed to HTML3.2 and HTML2.0,
does not attempt only to reflect the existing widely supported markup, but
also to set a coordinating specification for the future,
thus some not so widely supported markup is present in HTML4.0.

Also other browser vendors apart from Microsoft implemented experimental
markup, submitted proposals to the W3C, and 
participate in the W3C process. 

Regards,


Nir Dagan

http://www.nirdagan.com
mailto:nir@nirdagan.com
tel:+972-2-588-3143

"There is nothing quite so practical as a good theory."
-- A. Einstein

Received on Thursday, 18 March 1999 12:23:37 UTC