This topic was discussed last month, with good results.
http://www.mail-archive.com/wsg%40webstandardsgroup.org/msg17988.html
On Jul 1, 2005, at 3:03 PM, Iain wrote:
If I were to write a webpage in XHTML of any flavour but also made
the effort to serve it with the correct MIME-type to browsers which
support it, that would work fine, but the benefits would be
debatable. If I had javascripts within those pages and the pages
were served as XML, some methods that work when they are served as
plain old HTML would not work in an XML document.
The counter argument, over which you are free to decide, goes like this:
1. Serving two MIME types is likely not worth the cost, since there
is likely few XML abilities you would use in today's browser market.
2. Properly coded, XHTML served as text/html does not break in
today's browsers. There are valid arguments that XHTML does not make
*valid* HTML, but XHTML does not break because today's browsers do
not fully implement HTML. Being that HTML is dead, they are unlikely to.
3. Your site is likely to exist in the future to some extent, and at
some time you might need to port your current pages into a future
format; this format is likely to be XML-based.
4. Coding as XHTML today does nothing for your site today (unless you
serve two MIME-types, in which case it increases your work), but it
may significantly reduce your effort to port it to tomorrow's format.
Others argue that a port is a port, and cleaning the XHTML so that
you can use XSLT to manage the port is little different than cleaning
your HTML and using a Perl script to port the pages over. I'm a wiz a
Perl and would have no problem, but I sorta hope I'm running the
company when it comes time for porting, and the guys that port my
code are going to know XSLT -- so I'm writing XHTML today for them,
not for me. Also, I expect the odd errors that creep into XHTML are
easier to clean than the odd errors and coding variances that crop up
in HTML.
--
Ben Curtis : webwright
bivia : a personal web studio
http://www.bivia.com
v: (818) 507-6613
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