On 3/13/06, sime <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Rephrased, what are the different situations in which you'd use HTML4 over > XHTML1? So far > I've been led to believe (outside of this list) that XHTML is a step forward.
You're serving your XHTML as text/html, so it's effectively being parsed as HTML anyway. If you were using XHTML served as application/xhtml+xml (is that right? can't recall the exact string right now...), which is as it should be if you actually have a reason for using XHTML aside from "it's like HTML, only... extensible!" (without knowing what extensible entails) then every time you had a trivial markup error browsers would give a nice big parser error page (with the exception of our esteemed friend Internet Explorer, which doesn't even attempt to render pages served as anything other than text/html). XHTML *could* be a step forward if you desparately need to be able to parse your pages and use XSLT or something, but barring that there's absolutely nothing wrong with HTML 4. Even with XML, it's only sensible to use a schema with widely recognised semantics -- so, whilst you can theoretically add your own elements, etc., to an XML document, there's no point if these elements exist outside the vocabulary of any parsers (I'm thinking specifically of search engines, but there are others for which this matters). With XHTML for today's web, you can only really consider using it as HTML anyway (unless you have a highly controlled intranet environment, but that's internal) in terms of how it's served, and the scope of the schema: and this latter point is unlikely to vary much even in the future, one would hope, for the sake of backwards-compatability. Josh ~ who hasn't ranted about XHTML vs HTML before at any great length and may be slightly off on the specifics of certain points ****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ******************************************************
