On Wed, 29 Nov 2000, you wrote: > James A Sutherland wrote: > > > > On Wed, 29 Nov 2000, you wrote: > > > James A Sutherland wrote: > > > > > > > > Except the current contents of header.html aren't the header we > > > > want, or structured in the way needed. Changing the contents of > > > > header.html would break every page in docs ATM; putting the new > > > > header in a new file allows for a gradual changeover. > > > > > > By the way, I'm +1 on this approach. > > > > Great - now we just need to find someone to do it :-) > > > > Personally, I'd rather go for XHTML1, unless there are any pressing reasons > > not > > to; apart from lower-casing the tags, the changes needed are fairly > > trivial. I > > looked at this briefly a few months ago, and apart from the changes in > > single > > tags (<br> etc), everything the Validator complained about consisted of > > genuine > > errors - wrongly escaped special characters etc. > > > > Does anyone have any objections to XHTML1 over HTML4? The extra effort is > > minimal, and won't break anything, but it does show up some other errors > > which > > need fixing. > > I feel like I missed large parts of this conversation, what with a sick > 2-year-old and cleaning up from having everyone here for Thanksgiving. > Who knew it could take most of the weekend to get caught up on dishes?
Sorry to hear that - hope the 2yo is better now? I'm in the UK, so Thanksgiving didn't show on the radar - now I'm spending Christmas in Texas. Hrm. > Are you proposing that all the documentation be moved to XHTML, or just > these header files? The former is a sizeable undertaking from two > fronts. One, we're talking about a lot of docs to convert. Two, we're > talking about educating every contributer to submit stuff in XHTML, when > they are used to writing HTML. The changes required aren't huge; the only major thing is using lowercase for tags. You need to put a trailing slash on single tags, too; apart from that, it's no big deal. > I can see that this conversation has gone on for a while, and I'll try > to find time to go back and read the whole thing if I have a chance > later today. The original suggestion was to create a new header which contains a doctype tag for HTML 4, to use instead of the old header which just adds the banner graphic; Ken and I then spent a while arguing at cross purposes, before realising we agreed on the correct solution. I suggested aiming for XHTML1 rather than HTML4 (Transitional) on the basis it's not much harder to comply with. The main reason is just that Validator can then pick up quite a few subtle errors, such as not escaping special characters properly; otherwise, it takes very careful proof-reading to realise this. Basically, going for XHTML isn't a huge undertaking, and allows us to get much better automatic checking. It would also be nice to boast compliance with the latest and greatest standards :-) James.
