On Thursday 2007-03-08 00:09 +0900, Michael(tm) Smith wrote: > It's really amusing to see people continuing to trot out > matter-of-fact statements dismissing XHTML. Those statements seem > to fall into two basic types that can be paraphrased as either:
My dismissal doesn't fall into either of those types. My dismissal of XHTML is that the designers of XHTML and related standards are repeatedly introducing more and more incompatibility between XHTML and HTML, which makes it progressively harder for authors to transition to XHTML (particularly to do so gradually on a large site). For example: * The W3C XHTML Working Group insists that all the HTML-specific statements in CSS don't apply to XHTML (and got the CSS working group to put this into the CSS specs). This means that an author converting HTML to XHTML doesn't need to just convert the syntax used in their markup (including case of tags), they may also need to make significant redesigns to their CSS to avoid depending on the HTML-specific rules in CSS. * When namespace APIs were added in DOM Level 2, the W3C DOM Working Group insisted that HTML (which has no concept of namespaces) be reflected into those APIs as though it were a series of elements in no namespace. This is different from the way XHTML is reflected, which means that in many cases it is significantly harder than it should be to write a script that works with both XHTML and HTML (which is necessary for site-wide scripts when one is starting to use XHTML on a site, especially if the use case for switching to XHTML is compound documents, where there might be elements called "a" that aren't HTML a elements). Fortunately the WHATWG HTML5 spec reverses this bad decision. Almost all of the claimed advantages of XHTML come from its XML-ness, so why keep adding more incompatibility just for purity's sake? My dismissal of XHTML is that if those designing standards that are not yet widely adopted (compared to HTML) keep making it harder and harder to transition, they'll prevent that transition from ever occurring. And if that transition is never going to occur on a large scale, why worry about it? -David -- L. David Baron <URL: http://dbaron.org/ > Technical Lead, Layout & CSS, Mozilla Corporation
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