Re: xhtml media types

On Tue, 15 Jun 2004, Beton, Richard wrote:

> Why use XHTML1.1? Because it's a proper subset with no <font> etc, so it
> forces you to use stylesheets properly.

I'm afraid this is fairly off-topic in this list, but as that common claim
has been expressed, I cannot resist the temptation to remind that it is
both wrong and misleading. For some odd reason, people seem to think
that XHTML 1.1 is stricter than XHTML 1.0. You can achieve exactly the
same strictness in XHTML 1.0 Strict, too, and in HTML 4.01 Strict, which
is what your documents will actually be treated as when sent to Internet
Explorer, no matter what formal liturgy you use. Moreover, while using any
of these strict versions HTML "forces" the author to use stylesheets if he
wants to affect presentation significantly, it by no means forces him to
use stylesheets _properly_. People can, and often do, author HTML pages
with little more than <div> and <span>, styled with CSS using fixed font
sizes, etc.

Regarding the use of validators, if you wish to use a validator to check
that your (or your staff's) markup does not contain any undesired
presentational markup, you surely do _not_ need to sing the XHTML 1.1 song
for that.

-- 
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

Received on Tuesday, 15 June 2004 13:29:07 UTC