On 07/02/06, Design Groups <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I have a project coming up in the very near future.  It's for a company that
> is some kind of investment firm, and they have a *ton* of data that is
> tabular in form.  They want to use tables *only* for the tabular data, and
> that's it - the rest is supposed to be in XHTML.

How are the tables supposed to be marked up if not (X)HTML?

> Now, I've been told my *my* boss that the client eventually wants to move
> the site into complete XML - not necessarily now, but in the next couple of
> years.  So they want me to code the site in as strict XHTML as I possibly
> can.

> I have no problem doing this - I am aware, though, that if you use the XHTML
> 1.1 documentation, you should really serve the page up as an XML document
> using "application/xml" or something like that, and that many people who use
> XHTML 1.1 incorrectly serve up the document (I'm guilty of this in the
> past).

So use XHTML 1.0, I'm betting that you don't use any of the new
features introduced in XHTML 1.1 anyway.

Better yet, transform the data to HTML 4.01 before serving it up to
the client. Support is much better.

> Anyway, I'd like to have this site function and work properly with CSS and
> XHTML 1.1 - if I can even go as far as XML, I'd love to.  Or, would you all
> stick with XHTML 1.0 Strict and let them work it up to XML themselves?

XHTML *is* XML. Its a standard XML language and is thus much better
then a custom XML language designed to do the same job.

Since they have lots of tabular data, its possible that it would be
useful to provide that data in a custom XML format for clients to
process in to their own databases / applications / whatever. In that
case it might be useful to include an alternative version of the data
in some custom (or standard, you haven't said what the data is) XML
format for access by things other than webbrowsers displaying data to
the user.

> I know when I've *tried* to do XHTML 1.1 (and serve it up as an XML doc) I get
> all kinds of weird errors and code things - it just seems so difficult.

"Weird errors and code things" is a rather vague description of the
problem. I don't find authoring XHTML 1.1 difficult, but I can't
really suggest any remedies to the problems you're having based on
that.

> It's kind of exciting to actually have a client that understands some of this 
> stuff
> for once

Unfortunately, it *sounds* (I could very well be mistaken about this)
like they have heard a lot of buzzwords and don't actually understand
that technology or the implications of using it. So - be careful,
assess their needs and give them advice based on those needs.


--
David Dorward <http://dorward.me.uk><http://blog.dorward.me.uk>
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