Stewart Stremler wrote: > begin quoting Paul G. Allen as of Fri, Feb 23, 2007 at 09:39:38AM -0800: >> On Thu, 2007-02-22 at 20:18 -0800, Rick Funderburg wrote: > [snip] >>> Indeed. But if you do want a reason to not like XHTML, you could claim >>> that it is poorly supported by browsers, since some browsers (like IE) >>> do not support the appropriate mime types[1]. > > Why should _any_ mime times be supported, rather than being completely > optional?
I don't grasp what you are saying? The web depends on mime-types. Of course, the web _is_ optional, I suppose. :-) > >> As with HTML, CSS, etc. if the browser writers would use the W3C >> standards and verification tools, then all browsers would work far >> better. > > You might as wish that the W3C would provide better standards; every > time I go look at "W3C standards" I start wondering what sort of drugs > they're smoking (and why they're on such a power-trip). They're not as > bad as ECMA, but still... Perhaps not all agree, but I think the W3C standards have been enormously successful at resolving the horrors of html incompatibily that haunted the good-old v3.0 browser days. I think that CSS is really really really good idea, and works fairly well. It still needs work, but it sure makes webpage maintenance possible rather than black art. If you're not worried about maintenance, then it sorta doesn't matter, I guess. I am convinced that xhtml is the right successor to html, and gets us closer to various benefits (including the "semantic web"). Although I agree there are some transition pains, it seems to me that the trend setters are coping fine, and developing good examples and practices. The W3C is bound to suffer the same problems as all standards bodies. But I wouldn't give up on standards, and I wouldn't rate W3C as any worse than other groups (although I am just speculating on this last point, without any firsthand expertise). > >> This goes further to other web developers as well (I admit to my own >> laziness at times when just trying to get a page or several pages done >> quickly and I skip the standards verification step. > > So is it a problem with the browser developers or the web developers? > Standards adherence is a problem with browser developers. Maybe always will be, since standards will likely always be evolving. The best they can do is attempt to meet standards at given milestones and selectively support ongoing improvements. Writing valid html (or xhtml or css) is not too hard if you do it for a living, or do a lot of it, or just do it for satisfaction. There are validators readily available, and while they themselves are imperfect, they are _pretty good_. http://validator.w3.org/detailed.html http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/ Checking your code with a validator can be a useful debugging step. The biggest challenge these days is (still) coping with the remaining browser differences, but I am impressed with the suggestion to first write valid code, then adapt as required to either achieve acceptable appearance on the common browsers, and/or at least fail gracefully (ie, to an unstyled appearance). Did I mention that I like CSS? Regards, ..jim -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
