Chris Bentley wrote: > > Are there any parsers out there you explicitly trust to get it right > > every > > time? I don't. > I know of one, http://validator.w3.org/. Are you say though that User > Agents are generally better/fast at parsing/rendering valid XHTML than > they are valid HTML?
No, that is not what I meant at all. I'm talking about the parser and rendering engine in user agents. No, you are missing the point. Maybe you need to go back and study parser logic rendering markup a bit more. > > They may well do, but they are still guessing if there are > > no end tags. I'm much more happy to explicitly declare my design than > > have > > parsers guessing at what I've designed, the performance trade off is > > not so > > great. > > > I like to write valid markup too, and if your HTML is valid (written > against the DTD) then the parser doesn't have to guess anything, I > don't see your point as to why valid XHTML is technically better than > than valid HTML. I am talking about CSS applied to HTML and the rendering of the CSS as applied to the parsing of the document. But still, strictly speaking, an XML based document is bound to be more semantically correct because it is well formed. This means that the CSS can be applied without fear of the parser misunderstanding where a declaration could have finished. There is no possibility of any guess work in xhtml as it is well formed. This may or may not be an obvious problem. But I would not be surprised to see complex designs misrendered when transformed from xhtml to html4 with all optional ending tags taken out. What I am saying is that with XHTML the designers knows this won't happen, given the correctness of the parser. > > Now go into the area of accessibility, how are you going to tell all > > sorts > > of user agents and devices the full semantic meaning of the markup. > > What > > about when aural.css becomes mature? Will complex document in HTML4 > > be as > > exact as those following XML syntax? > > > Yes, if you write it against the DTD and follow accessibility > guidelines. There is no difference between the semantics or the > accessibility of HTML4.1 and XHTML1.0. You may be right, but I don't agree. It's only a small difference, but it is there. > > In my view, you cannot fully mark up > > documents with a trusted explicit semantic fullness without and XML > > definition. The border here might be small, but it's small enough for > > one > > definition to allow for best of interpretation and the other an > > explicit > > interpretation. > > Well-formedness has nothing to do with semantics. > You're missing the point. Closing tags is being completely accurate with punctuation, where markup is the punctuation. Not closing tags CAN lead to ambiguity. In XHTML there is no syntax ambiguity, in HTML4 there are possibilities. It may not happen when validating against the doctype. That is not the problem. The problem is the CSS container, it's boundaries are often not certain. > Except for the reasons give by Peter Ottrey the only technical reason > for using XHTML is that you need the XML (this being the only technical > difference between HTML4.1 and XHTML 1.0 ). Any other reason simply > comes done to a matter of personal preference. > I don't agree with that. ----- Geoff ****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ******************************************************
