Matthew Cruickshank wrote:
Lachlan Hunt wrote:
http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/wrongWithIE/?chapter=XHTML
...if you use the <?xml?> declaration..., then it will trigger quirks mode in
IE6
Right... rather than jumping to conclusions I was just wanting to make
sure you were telling a beginner at html/css that "IE does not support
XHTML" because of relatively minor things like http headers and xml
declarations.
Such things aren't "relatively minor". If you're not using the right
MIME type, you may as well be using HTML4, as you're just relying on
browsers error recovery techniques to understand XHTML. Plus, I'm sure
you've read Ian Hickson's "Serving XHTML as text/html considered
harmful" article?!
Also, it's very important to be aware of the xml declaration issue,
beginners must not learn to rely on quirks mode behaviour, they need to
learn standards compliant behavior from the beginning, so it's important
that it not be used.
I didn't even mention other issues such as scripts, stylesheets, and the
use of named entity references in XHTML, which are also important for
authors to understand, but such a discussion would just take too long
and it's much easier to tell a beginner to use HTML4 properly, than for
them to try and understand all issues with XHTML when they don't have
much experience with HTML.
I'm a bit of a standards nazi, don't get me wrong, but I think you're
misleading Lori.
I don't. I think it's important for beginners to learn correctly from
the beginning, not be mislead into thinking that they're using XHTML
properly and thinking that it is supported by IE, when it's clearly not.
I mean no one goes around saying Firefox doesn't support HTML and CSS
because it doesn't pass the Acid test or implement soft-hyphens[1]
There's a difference between limited support and absolutely no support.
In the case of Firefox support for HTML and CSS, it has limited
support and the soft-hyphen bug is just one of them that has been around
for many years.
In fact, no browser fully supports HTML4, but their support is
sufficient enough for it be used, as most of the unsupported features
(mostly SHORTTAG related) provide no additional expressive power over
the supported ones. No browser fully supports CSS2.1 yet either, though
some are very close. But, again, the support is sufficient enough for
many of the features to be widely used.
In the case of IE and XHTML, there isn't even limited support for it,
there's none at all. There's only complicated error handling that
manages to make sense out of all those extra slashes when it's parsing
it as tag soup.
--
Lachlan Hunt
http://lachy.id.au/
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