Re: HTML or XHTML - why do you use it?

> >   1. Authors write invalid XHTML (or XHTML that makes other
> >      assumptions that are only valid for tag soup or HTML UAs, and not
> >      XHTML UAs), and send it as text/html.
>
> I am truly amazed by your findings.  It would seem obvious
> to me that those sufficiently aware of XHTML to be interested in
> migrating to it would by definition have been those to whom
> validation was already second nature.

Did you miss the parenthetical above?  There are many gotchas to sending XHTML
as XHTML that a validator will _not_ catch (eg a validator will _not_ spot
commented out script or style, incorrectly cased style, issues with
non-namespace-aware DOM calls, etc).

So part of the problem is that having your document validate is necessary but
not sufficient to ensure that things don't break horribly when you switch from
text/html to text/xml or application/xhtml+xml.

Boris
-- 
If you put garbage in a computer nothing comes out but
garbage.  But this garbage, having passed through a
very expensive machine, is somehow ennobled and none
dare criticize it.

Received on Tuesday, 7 January 2003 12:54:21 UTC