On Wed, 29 Nov 2000, James A Sutherland wrote: > 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 have considered this issue. It could be done relatively painlessly through the use of htmltidy, which also has the advantage of fixing up small coding mistakes. However, I see two major issues: 1. Once this is done, there is absolutely no way to make one patch that will apply against both the httpd-docs-1.3 tree and the httpd-docs-2.0 tree. Every change would need to be written twice. However, the trees are diverging at a quick enough pace right now, that this won't be a real issue for long. 2. As Rich mentioned, this increases the barrier to entry. XHTML does not appear to be any harder than HTML in general, but it is less forgiving. We may be restricting even further the number of people willing to work on docs. Having said that, if someone feels like they want to take this on as a project, I would have no objections. However, it is not something that I am going to put high on my priority list, when there are so many content-related things which still need to be done. It is a significant enough change, that I would probably run it by new-httpd before making any decisions. We need to make sure that it would not pose a barrier to any of the developers when it comes to documenting their work. Joshua.
