Today Tim did spake thusly:
Tim:
XHTML has to be served as if it were HTML, for the most prolific web
browser in the world to render it. If served as XHTML, it will only
download it. What's the point of writing XHTML pretending that it's
HTML?
Scott van Looy:
It's a better structure. Makes one more diciplined. It's just not the best
thing to learn from scratch.
It's the same structure. The main difference being that you do write in
the previously optional closing tags. And that's always been a
recommendation with HTML, anyway. There's been quite a few browsers
which make mistakes when you didn't explictly type in the closing tags.
It's not. You can mix tags up in HTML4, even though it's not recommended,
whereas in XHTML they have to nest correctly.
And doing so brings in other strange compatibility issues (MSIE's
quirks/not-quirks modes are bad enough, already, likewise for other
browsers playing similar silly tricks).
Not at all. If you add a doctype then your document is rendered in
standards compliance mode.
There's more to it than that. Depending on how you typed in the
doctype, browsers would behave variously, in manners that they shouldn't
do.
Not at all. If you type in the correct doctype they switch from quirks
mode to standards compliance mode. IE6 is fussy and so will stay in quirks
mode if anything appears above the doctype (spaces, carriage returns, the
XML declaration, anything) so you need to watch for that, but that's all
XHTML isn't html HTML. There are other clients which don't handle
XHTML, and throwing XHTML at them means they'll interpret it
differently, according to the rules of HTML. That extra slash, added to
non-empty elements, actually has another meaning.
Doesn't
Fraid so, and it's nothing to do with Netscape, it's the rules of HTML,
itself.
e.g. XHTML <br/> is NOT the same as HTML <br>, it's really <br>> (a line
break element, followed by a greater-than sign that should be visibly
rendered).
In Netscape 4. Perhaps. It's why if you wish for compatibility you write
it as <br />
Same problem (even with the space). The slash has a special meaning,
there.
Both <br/> or <br /> are actually <br>> in "HTML". And HTML client that
renders is like that is behaving correctly, any that doesn't, isn't.
In which case not a single modern browser behaves correctly, which I find
unlikely ;)
The original idea of XHTML would be that you (the author) either get it
right, or the browser refuses to display it. At long last, we'd be rid
of crap web sites, because the author would immediately see that they'd
cocked it up. But, no. We're back to square one with browsers still
doing the tag soup analysis of XHTML/HTML, so we've lost that benefit.
They'll keep on producing crap.
Unless you use a doctype, in which case it's all fine.
Keep watching. If, and when, Microsoft decides to make MSIE render
XHTML served as XHTML (i.e. with the right MIME type, etc.), it won't be
long before they make the browser always try and render an XHTML page,
no matter how broken it is.
That's always been the behaviour of browsers, it's wrong but all of them
do it
As it stands, XHTML is a waste of time, and a new set of problems.
Not at all. If you create well formed XHTML you can be reasonably sure
that all browsers will display it pretty much the same. If you create tag
soup then you're stuck with quirks mode in IE6+ and Firefox/Mozilla and
then you have to write specific CSS for each of them, which is vile.
The non-use of XHTML doesn't automatically mean that you create tag-soup
HTML. We've had validators and other error checkers for years, but
authors don't make use of them.
Do too :P
Well formed HTML does *exactly* the same job as well formed XHTML does.
XHTML is not the magic fix people vaunt it to be. Nor will it ever be
until Microsoft gets their head kicked in.
You can write perfectly valid HTML4 that renders entirely differently in
FF IE and Safari. It's only in standards compliance mode using XHTML that
they start to actually correctly render pages. FF is broken in bits, IE is
broken in other bits and so is Safari. Not a single one of them actually
adheres correctly to the standard.
Conversely, correctly written and served XHTML can't even be read by
over 60% of the browsers.
84% (IE)
--
Scott van Looy - email:me@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx | web:www.ethosuk.org.uk
site:www.freakcity.net - the in place for outcasts since 2003
PGP Fingerprint: 7180 5543 C6C4 747B 7E74 802C 7CF9 E526 44D9 D4A7
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Use the Force, Luke.
