Cameron Edwards wrote:
Following some of the very interesting UK .gov mails of late, I've been
involved in a fierce debate about serving XHTML 1.0 STRICT either as
application/xhtml+xml or text/html, content negotiation and the like -
whether, in fact, the world is ready for XHTML etc
While I do strongly believe the future of the web lies with XHTML [1],
the world is not ready for it yet, which is why I currently advocate
that beginners learn HTML. Before XHTML can be used seriously on the
web, here a few milestones we need to reach first:
* Majority of UAs support XHTML
(including Google, IE, lynx, handheld devices, etc.)
* Support for incremental rendering.
Gecko currently cannot incrementally render XHTML.
* CMSs need to properly support XHTML, using XML tools that guarentee
well-formedness and validity.
* CMSs need to handle character encodings correctly
(there are currently significant problems with blogs handling
trackbacks from sites in a different character encoding)
* CMSs need to be able to serve XHTML as XML to users that support it
and transform to HTML for those that don't.
(not just content-negotiation, I mean actual XSLT transformation
(or equivalent) from XHTML to HTML)
Plus, the following extras would be nice, but not essential:
* ECMAScript for XML (E4X) widely supported
* MathML, SVG, XForms, etc. widely supported
(natively in implementations, not just plugins)
Until such a time, there is little point using XHTML for any major
corporate or government site, especially if you don't need to use any
XML only features, like mixed namespaces, etc.
By the way, for anyone interested, the next versions of XHTML, including
XHTML 2.0 and the WHATWG's XML serialisation of HTML 5 (XHTML 5), are
being defined so that they *must not* be served as text/html.
[1] http://lachy.id.au/log/2005/04/xhtml-future
--
Lachlan Hunt
http://lachy.id.au/
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