Re: CSS3 specs using invalid XHTML samples

On Wed, 14 Aug 2002, Joshua Prowse wrote:
>
> The current version of HTML that the W3C recommends that people use
> on their pages is XHTML.
>
> If the W3C doesn't use XHTML in its own recommendations, how can it
> expect web authors to do so?

Well, people seem to have no trouble writing pages in what they claim
is XHTML, so that doesn't seem to be a problem. [1]

I don't see any particular advantage to rewriting all the examples to
use XHTML. I see one distinct _dis_advantage, which is that the
several years of proof reading that these examples have been receiving
would be wasted. It was hard enough getting the 300-page spec to its
current state, I'd rather not have to rewrite the examples now.

However, if there are any validation errors, they should be corrected.


[1] What _is_ a problem is the fact that most of these "XHTML" pages
don't validate, and thus any client that actually handled XHTML sent
as text/html as XHTML rather than as tag soup (which is what WinIE,
MacIE, Mozilla, Konqueror and Opera do, for instance) would end up
printing a validation error instead of the page.

And since the whole point of XHTML was to avoid the problem with tag
soup and just use valid markup, I don't see that encouraging people to
use XHTML with text/html is a particularly good thing.

-- 
Ian Hickson                                     )\     _. - ._.)       fL
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Received on Wednesday, 14 August 2002 18:51:00 UTC