- From: Masayasu Ishikawa <mimasa@w3.org>
- Date: Wed, 29 May 2002 02:39:11 +0900 (JST)
- To: www-tag@w3.org
"Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com> wrote: > On the HTML side, however, the lax approach to structure which initially > made it easy to get pages onto the Web is now strangling us as > developers try to do more with the Web. Dynamic HTML and its brethren > were an early sign to one group of Web developers that more careful > coding was necessary. Browser-war madness where vendors tried to keep > up with each other's idiosyncratic corner-case handling was another > consequence. Perhaps the saddest consequence of all is the large number > of tools for working with HTML (as HTML, not just text) which still spit > out poorly-formed and not valid HTML with the understanding that it's > the browser's job to cope. > > XML seemed to signal a change in this approach, taking much of HTTP's > "it's okay to show errors to users" instead of HTML's "do your best no > matter how potent the stench". The XHTML specification seems to follow > the XML route, but implementations are still catching up. Most XHTML browsers show errors against not well-formed XHTML document, when the document is served as 'application/xhtml+xml', 'application/xml' or 'text/xml' [1]. That's part of the reason why the HTML WG discourages the use of 'text/html' and recommends to use 'application/xhtml+xml' for XHTML Family documents [2]. I sincerely hope more implementations support that practice. [1] http://www.w3.org/People/mimasa/test/xhtml/media-types/results [2] http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/NOTE-xhtml-media-types-20020430 Regards, -- Masayasu Ishikawa / mimasa@w3.org W3C - World Wide Web Consortium
Received on Tuesday, 28 May 2002 13:39:15 UTC