Matthew Cruickshank wrote:
Lachlan Hunt wrote:
I might add that my "fringe and pedantic opinion" is based on fact,
and that not one valid technical argument has yet been raised in this
thread against any of the technical reasons I've posted.
Ah, but the argument is not strictly one of technicalities -- it's a
matter of opinion about what is sufficient support and what compliance
means.
You've arbitrarily decided that IE has sufficient support for HTML but
not XHTML,
That's because IE's parsing and rendering engines were not built with
XHTML processing in mind at all, they were only built HTML in mind. The
fact that XHTML is compatible with such broken HTML parsers is irrelvant
to the fact that it doesn't actually support it at all.
MIME types are what matters, DOCTYPEs don't (except insofar as
quirks/standards mode are concerned). Regardless of what the DOCTYPE
says and the syntax used, if it's labelled as text/html, it's HTML,
albeit very likely invalid HTML that relies on the undefined and reverse
engineered error handling behaviour of browsers to support it.
that the internal rendering engine affects XHTML compliance
The rendering engine itself doesn't affect the compliance of the
document, the MIME type it's delivered with, however, does; and the idea
of using the wrong MIME type to trick some ancient browser into doing
something useful with the document is ludicrous.
How many XHTML as text/html documents out there do you think actually
conform 100% to the guidelines set forth in Appendix C? Virtually nil!
None of these opinions is based on W3C standards, and so it's difficult
to refute your ideas.
There are no W3C standards on this matter, or at least none that can be
taken seriously.
XHTML 1.0, section 5.1 Internet Media Type states:
| XHTML Documents which follow the guidelines set forth in Appendix C,
| "HTML Compatibility Guidelines" may be labeled with the Internet Media
| Type "text/html" [RFC2854], as they are compatible with most HTML
| browsers. Those documents, and any other document conforming to this
| specification, may also be labeled with the Internet Media Type
| "application/xhtml+xml" as defined in [RFC3236]. For further
| information on using media types with XHTML, see the informative note
| [XHTMLMIME].
Although that section claims to be normative, it references an
*informative* appendix and *informative* note. Appendix C has been
successfully disputed many times and because it's informative, it can't
be normatively referenced anyway.
So, while technically serving XHTML as text/html is allowed, that
doesn't make it a good idea. All the purported benefits of XHTML are
nothing short of meaningless in a text/html environment, so why bother
teaching it to newcomers, when there is sufficient evidence to show that
the vast majority learn it wrongly?
This is not another opportunity for you to derail this thread with more
technical references. No one disagrees with that -- this thread is about
how it's best to teach people web standards. And you fail it.
It is about both. They are not mutually exclusive topics, you can't
talk about the reasons for teaching XHTML without talking about and
satisfying the technical reasons for using it in the first place.
--
Lachlan Hunt
http://lachy.id.au/
******************************************************
The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/
See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm
for some hints on posting to the list & getting help
******************************************************
