Promotion of XHTML

It's great how XHTML is progressing with version 2 etc. but it strikes me
that while the W3C is taking the specs into the future the majority of the
Web Development world is lagging miles behind. I don't think I'm the first
one to have noticed this but wouldn't we be better putting out efforts into
getting other developers to do the XHTML walk rather than producing the
XHTML run?

For example, a college near to me teaches Web Design. They teach HTML not
XHTML. People come out of there happily writing <br> tags and not closing
their <p> tags and some will go on to create Web sites. I had an email from
a tutor in the states somewhere who is starting to teach his classes XHTML
this coming semester. I can't claim to having any more data than that but
from looking at code on the sites that I see it seems that most developers
still couldn't care less about closing their empty elements and making sure
all elements nest properly.

I'm just concerned that once XHTML 2 gets released people will hear about
it, no backwards compatability etc. and loads of new elements and be scared
by it. It's ok for us making the transition because we're already fully
aware of 1.0 but from what I've seen most are not, old habits die hard, and
especially with the number of people that know HTML. It's not like a new
version of Perl where the majority of users are enthusiastic about the
language, most people couldn't care less about the language and just want to
get the job done, how do we get them to start being more strict in their
coding practices?

For my part I've started a series of articles aimed at teaching XHTML to
beginners, if anyone is interested it's at:
http://www.miswebdesign.com/resources/articles/web-design-xhtml-1-1.html

Nigel Peck

MIS Web Design
http://www.miswebdesign.com/

Received on Monday, 30 December 2002 07:25:26 UTC