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Why most of us should NOT use XHTML

         

DrDoc

7:39 pm on Apr 1, 2006 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Ian Hickson, a member of the Mozilla.org Browser Standards Compliance QA team and an invited expert in the W3C CSS Working Group, explains why XHTML should not be sent as text/html: [hixie.ch...]

henry0

4:48 pm on Apr 3, 2006 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member




What happens when IE eventually supports application/xhtml+xml? I can assure you that a large percentage of current XHTML implementations will break. Who will the developers blame? The standard!

So this could be the real "Damocles sword"

Before starting to run like rats in a cage
do we have or do we foresee a schedule for the above to happen?

Allan Rasmussen

6:43 pm on Apr 3, 2006 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



What happens when IE eventually supports application/xhtml+xml? I can assure you that a large percentage of current XHTML implementations will break.

Not unless the author changes the mime-type, .html files are likely to always be sent as text/html, whereas .xhtml files already are being sent as application/xhtml+xml on most servers. And it will probably take maaany years till application/xhtml+xml is the default mime-type. But surely, many sites will "break" when the mime-type is changed.
Still though, a tentatively valid XHTML 1.0 Strict page is generally far less likely to break, than a tentatively valid HTML 4.01 Strict (even though the various tags are (self-)closed).

henry0

7:19 pm on Apr 3, 2006 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Mainly most of my sites are "strict" ready
but I have one that uses once target _blank
so I guess for the time being I will make them strict
and kill the _blank

This brings a question
any SEO "cost" related for changing a XHTML trans DTD? to a strict one or even from XHTML to strict HTML 4.01?
I do not think so but....

Allan Rasmussen

7:33 pm on Apr 3, 2006 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Mainly most of my sites are "strict" ready
but I have one that uses once target _blank
so I guess for the time being I will make them strict
and kill the _blank

Note though, that sites sent with an XML mime-type won't break due to things such as target="_blank"; avoiding such is simply a demand for being valid, not well-formed -- which is what determines whether the page will break or not.
However, I surely consider target="_blank" to be harmful, so I think you should remove it nonetheless. ;-)

This brings a question
any SEO "cost" related for changing a XHTML trans DTD? to a strict one or even from XHTML to strict HTML 4.01?
I do not think so but....

I can't imagine that should have any kind of influence on the search engines; the only reason could be the number of characters in it, causing the HTML5 <!DOCTYPE html> to be clearly preferable to the others -- but as it's processing information, I'd hardly believe it even if Matt Cutts says it does.

buckworks

7:42 pm on Apr 3, 2006 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Administrator 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



s that a joke? The page looks fine (like FireFox) in Safari on my machine.

No joke. It's just lines and lines of runon text, and a major portion of the content is simply not showing.

What version of Safari are you using? Mine is 1.3.2.

Wlauzon

1:20 am on Apr 4, 2006 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



A Bridge To The Future - Information week, May 2000

Well here it is 6 years later, and even xhtml 1.0 is still in the "recommendation" stage. 1.1 seems to be still in the draft stage (after 5+ years), and the status of 2.0 seems to be doubtful at best - from all appearances 2.0 will not be backwards compatible with much existing content, which makes it essentially a dead horse.

I see a lot of blame being placed on the browser makers, but I wonder how much of that is actually due to basically nothing being done for 6 years to make it a true standard?

When XHTML first was proposed, there were about 1/20th as many websites as there are now I would guess. It is starting to look like events will bypass w3c...

mattur

12:03 pm on Apr 4, 2006 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Well here it is 6 years later, and even xhtml 1.0 is still in the "recommendation" stage. 1.1 seems to be still in the draft stage (after 5+ years)...

Yup, and in 2006 we're still stuck with (X)HTML1997. That's 9 years of wasted development time we'll never see again. 9 years FFS!

...and the status of 2.0 seems to be doubtful at best - from all appearances 2.0 will not be backwards compatible with much existing content, which makes it essentially a dead horse.

And, by implication, xhtml1 too. xhtml1 was always seen as an intermediate step towards xhtml1.1/xhtml2:

xhtml1.1 is a "pain in the ass with no demonstrable benefit...Now that I’ve had a taste of what it's [xhtml1.0] allegedly a stepping stone towards, I just can’t see the point." , Mark Pilgrim, 2003 [diveintomark.org]

"The [xhtml2] spec may have tremendous benefits, but I’ve been doing this work for a while and I can’t see any."Jeffrey Zeldman, 2003 [zeldman.com]

"I think there needs to be a serious reconsideration of XHTML2 as an effort at all." Tantek Celik, 2003 [lists.w3.org]

"I do believe the whole thing should be, as it stands now, dropped and started again almost from scratch... I think that XHTML 2.0 is going to drastically increase the TCO of web sites... sorry to say, but XHTML 2.0 seems to me the live proof that something is going wrong at W3C", Daniel Glazman, 2003 [lists.w3.org]

To help repair the damage XHTML-advocacy has inflicted on the "web standards" movement (which I broadly support), the w3c may have to revise its entire approach to web page markup, or follow xhtml into irrelevance. That would be a disaster. I see no sign of the w3c recognising this.
</rant> :)

DrDoc

3:33 pm on Apr 4, 2006 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



All the greater reason not to use XHTML then :)

knighty

3:39 pm on Apr 4, 2006 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member




I'm just waiting for the thread that says : "Why most of us should NOT use CSS"

Allan Rasmussen

7:08 pm on Apr 4, 2006 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Rant time, is it? Well then:
I must agree: XHTML is bad & evil! HTML is so much better; for instance, would this:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN">
<tITLe>Suckiness test</TitlE>
</HEaD>
<boDy>
<P>Which language sucks? Here comes the answer:
<tAbLE><TR><td><!-- -- -->XHTML<!-- -- -->HTML<!-- -->!</TABLe>
<p>Undisputable. &copy
</HtmL>

...be valid in XHTML? No it wouldn't!

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