On Dec 28, 2008, at 9:13 PM, Landon Fuller wrote:
That article, written in September 2006, basically says forget XHTML and use HTML 4. Is that still the best advice today, over 2 years later? If so, I am given to wonder why we have the XHTML standard in the first place, if browser vendors recommend not using it.Yes, its still valid due to browsers not behaving correctly with the xml tags and the application/xhtml+xml content type. The following pages are served as HTML 4.01:http://webkit.org/ http://mozilla.org/These are served as XHTML 1.0, which doesnt have the leading xml tag, and they use an html content type, which is technically wrong but it makes browsers handle it better:http://microsoft.com/ http://opera.com/So if the browser vendors are not using XHTML 1.1, why are we going through all this trouble?While I worked at Three Rings, we moved all of Puzzle Pirates (www.puzzlepirates.com ) to XHTML 1.0 without any issues -- and we had a very sizable IE- using customer base.The reason that we did this is simple -- XHTML being well formed XML, it is easily parsed, and and is easily validated. Our translation system was implemented using XML tags (<i18n:text>) and we were able to do a combination of runtime processing using JSPX (templates defined with server-side custom XML tags), and build-time processing using XML-based tools. Adding new XML tags wound up being a very clean approach that our web designers quickly understood -- and really liked (especially since they could write their own custom tags very easily, too).The document processing also inherently validated document "well- formedness".This was all done without any notable headaches incurred in serving "tag soup" to IE users. We stuck to XHTML 1.0, and followed the informative guidelines at http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/#guidelines . I thought we might have to translate the XHTML to normative HTML4 content, but it was never necessary.So if I may be bold, arguments against XHTML simply do not consider the potential value in having a document format that is both readily extensible and parseable. Even dealing with XML is better than implementing tools to safely and reproducibly parse (and modify) tag soup.My two cents =) Landon
I believe there is a big difference between XHTML 1.0 and 1.1 when dealing with IE compatibility. Mac OS Forge uses a lot of XHTML 1.0 for Trac templates (Genshi), which is similar to your use of it for server side processing. My main point was that the MacPorts website was simple enough to be HTML4 and would be the least effort. XHTML 1.0 would be fine, especially if we want to localize it or use templates.
Basically, I'm suggesting using anything but XHTML 1.1. -Bill
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