RE: Promotion of XHTML

I would assume because in the future when browsers catch up you'll already
be familiar with the XHTML standard and won't have as much difficulty moving
your skills/documents to XHTML 2.0 or whatever is relevant at the time?

-----Original Message-----
From: www-html-request@w3.org [mailto:www-html-request@w3.org]On Behalf
Of John Lewis
Sent: 31 December 2002 00:20
To: www-html@w3.org
Subject: Re: Promotion of XHTML



Peter wrote on Monday, December 30, 2002 at 12:41:34 PM:

> John Lewis wrote on Monday, December 30, 2002 1:16 PM
>> The original point was, for those documents NOT served as
>> text/html, Win IE chokes.

> Would you argue that developers should not bother to write valid
> XHTML *web* documents merely because they must be treated as
> text/html?

I don't understand the question, so no, I probably wouldn't argue
that. :)

> Since most web developers primarily write HTML documents, would they
> not be better off writing them as XHTML?

No, (most of them) would be better off continuing to write the HTML
documents as HTML. As far as I understand it, XHTML is supposed to be
"HTML as XML." If you aren't planning to take advantage of XHTML,
writing HTML 4.1 as HTML 4.1 is, by definition, easier than writing
HTML 4.1 as XHTML 1.0. The whole point of the compatibility guidelines
is so that you can write XHTML 1.0 that an HTML browser can treat as
HTML; if you're going to to that, great, fine. But you're going to
extra trouble for no gain (other than XHTML's "coolness"). If you're
writing HTML, what's the purpose of writing it as XHTML and then
making sure it's sort of HTML, in addition to worrying about browser
incompatibilities *because it's XHTML*?

--
John

Received on Monday, 30 December 2002 19:43:04 UTC