The voices are telling me that YoYoEtc said on 5/14/2004 5:57 PM:
So does that mean if I put "XHTML 1.0 Transitional that any code that is of either HTML 4.0 or XHTML 1.0 will be accepted by validators?
I see my validator is presently set at HTML 4.0 Transitional so I assume that means that the validator will accept anything between HTML 3.2 (which I believe is the version just prior to 4.0) or 4.0.
Pretty much. I'd like to throw in an opinion I haven't seen much around these parts: the darn spec is five years old, isn't it about time we go to strict?
And so I did. And what I discovered, apart from a few things which are annoyances at first (you'll be surprised what kinds of things have to be enclosed in paragraph or div marks) that it wasn't that hard. Seriously. It wasn't that hard.
What's more, I'm writing (well, mostly Amaya and TopStyle are writing) actual XHTML. The "transitional" part just admits a whole bunch of extra crap in there which is mostly *not* semantic markup (imho). A small, simple subset of HTML (with a couple of grammar tweaks like <img... /> and <meta... />).
And what I'm left with is web pages that don't need to be scraped, they can be *parsed*. Data miners? I'm ready. Active server pages? Like rolling off a log. When you've got your content into semantic XHTML markup, each part practically sits up and tells you what table in your database it belongs in.
I think going halfway you're just borrowing trouble. Valid XHTML Strict is a much smaller set of valid words than valid XHTML Transitional. So simplify, learn the smaller set.
--
Rev. Bob "Bob" Crispen
bob at crispen dot org
Ex Cathedra Weblog: http://blog.crispen.org/
Some people just don't know how to drive... I call these people
"Everybody But Me"
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