Lori Cole wrote:
I was a science major in college and went into biotech which is dominated by men. Your advice to me as a newcomer to just stick with HTML4 rather than to try to learn the right way to use XHTML right off the bat reminded me of the experiences I have had in science that I believe have been sexist.
I have no idea how you could have interpreted my advice as being sexist in any way. In fact, I had no idea whether you were really male or female; because experience tells me that guessing a persons gender in an online community based on their name, when I know nothing of their culture or country of origin, is often an incorrect guess, so I assure you my comment was not meant as discriminatory in any way whatsoever.
My advice comes purely from my experience. Evidenced by the fact that the vast majority of people who attempt XHTML, often fail miserably to grasp the differences between HTML and XHTML. Not only are most sites claiming to be XHTML served as text/html not even well-formed, they often suffer from any number of other problems I have mentioned in this thread, and any future attempt at simply changing the MIME type will fail miserably.
If you choose to learn XHTML, I strongly advise you to gain a very good understanding of valid, semantic, non-presentational HTML first; you can't even begin to grasp the differences between HTML and XHTML if you don't know HTML first, let alone gain any serious benefit at all from using XHTML.
I urge you to prove me wrong, and show that you can learn XHTML correctly as a beginner without much HTML experience, but please understand that you are not the first to try, nor will you be the last, and the odds are not in your favour.
If you must go ahead with XHTML, then please at least develop and test your pages in an XML environment, even if you end up serving your pages to the world as text/html. Learning and developing XHTML in a text/html environment is a recipe for disaster.
-- 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 ******************************************************
