Re: name and id

I asked "Besides reverting to an earlier version of HTML, can anyone suggest
a way of getting 'id' to work in NN4?"
Christoph suggested that (a) this was somehow "off topic", (b) I should be
using an earlier flavor of HTML if I wanted to support NN4 and (c) that I
was never going to get most browsers to accept XHTML properly anyway.

First (a). I was given to understand that this was a place to discuss
technical aspects of HTML. XHTML (including in its 1.1 form) is designed to
be backwards-compatible, but I had come across one particular aspect that
was causing me a problem. I merely asked if there was an alternative. This
seems to be reasonably on topic to me, and far less controversial than the
"XHTML 2.0 considered harmful"-type discussion.

Second (b). It has always been my intention to write decent, well-formed
markup that will, to a certain extent, afford me forwards-compatibility.
When the time is right I would like to use some of the new technologies,
such as SVG. In order to make this possible I thought it would be best to
construct documents in the XML-friendly form. It is not important for me to
ensure these documents work in old browser like NN4, but I wanted to make
them as accessible as possible to all (which is presumably the goal of all
web authors, I would hope).

Finally (c). I am well aware that I am serving the pages up as text/html and
that this is not the correct MIME type for XHTML 1.1. I agree with Ian
Hickson that this is not the way to do things. Unfortunately, I simply
cannot afford to deny 92% of my users the opportunity to see my web pages
and deliver them as application/xhtml+xml, much as I would like to.

Kind regards

Simon Jessey

w: http://jessey.net/blog/
e: simon@jessey.net

Received on Saturday, 1 February 2003 22:21:44 UTC