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Why You Should Use XHTML
Da_Slayer writes "The w3's HTML group has released the 6th public working draft for XHTML 2.0. XHTML 2 is a general-purpose markup language designed for representing documents for a wide range of purposes across the Web. Meaning it is to be used for document structuring which is why it does not have presentation elements. The draft is located at w3's website. Also they have a FAQ about why you should use XHTML over HTML. It goes into specifics about embedding MathML, SVG, etc... and has links to tools and resources to help convert existing html documents to xhtml. One of those resources is a document on XML events and its advantages over the onclick style of event handling."
Yes. It is starting to really bug me. They could save a lot of bandwidth and make their page far more viewable with stylesheets if they moved the code into proper CSS and XHTML.
Grr.
The different HTML-Strict DTDs are nit-picking to the point that they preclude humans from writing code.
YES.
We should get ALL langauge compilers to ignore simple little syntax errors.
Why should we need a semi-colon to end a statement. The line feed should be enough.
Why should we need a closing brace. Cannot the compier SEE that it is the end of a block simply because the indenting is different?
!
The real problem is that people have been getting away with sloppy HTML. No closing TD, TR, TABLE tags because, hey, the browser allows it, and it works. Don't close italics in a TD cell? No problem!
MS started this mess when they had IE ignore HTML syntax errors. Netscape (at the time) was still strict. Suddenly many pages would not work in Netscape that worked in IE. This was perceived to be a Netscape problem, where in reality it was the coders problem.
Would YOU blame a compiler for trapping syntax errors? Of course not. So why should we allow sloppy HTML??
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I am a programmer. I am paid to produce syntax not grammar. Deal with it.
Pardon me, but I feel you're not being didactic enough in your answer (even though I totally agree with you), and since this issue is a pet peeve of mine, and I really want the message to be heard, I'll take the liberty on expanding on your arguments. I hope you'll forgive my rudeness :-)
So, why do we need a strict language that will barf at the first syntax error ? Well, it's simple : the current situation is a huge mess. No, wait, it's a *HUGE* mess. Currently, anyone can cobble up some shoddy webpages with some lame software (hint : it starts with "Front" and ends with "page") and slap them up on his Web space. Few will test their pages with more than one browser (namely, Internet Exploder), and even less will think of the implications of their design outside browser-land. What about search engines ? Speech synthesizers ? Intelligent agents who would like to quickly get a summary of the site to syndicate it ? All these systems have to be geared towards correcting user and software-generated mistakes to provide useful results. This demands more sophisticated engineering, render the software more complex, and is an incredible waste of resources. It also ensures that no two User Agents (be them browsers or something else) will have the same idea of a given HTML document. Thus, it renders the job of Web programmers (like yours truly) more difficult, and sometimes just insane (think Netscape 4.x). Another waste of resource, induced by the necessity to circumvent problems in UAs, themselves induced by their necessity to circumvent mistakes in the original code. It's a vicious circle that cannot be stopped, but for a shift to a more sound model. That's exactly what the W3C is promoting.
Also, I would like to debunk one persistent myth, viz. the idea that laymen would no longer be able to write Web pages when everybody will have switched to send data with a application/xhtml+xml MIME type. Let's be serious one moment : Joe Sixpack doesn't type HTML. Period. Good ol' Joe uses a WYSIWYG authoring tool (like the aforementioned abysmal failure from Seattle). I'm totally confident that these authoring tool will be updated to include support for XHTML, and even for semantic markup. So, Joe will be all of a sudden writing valid pages, without even noticing it. As for the people who write HTML in Vi, I assume they're knowledgeable enough to go read the documentation (I was, and I sure am not the sharpest knife in the drawer[*]), so there's still no problem.
That's it. I hope you'll see there are indeed reasons to move over to a more rational way of creating Web documents, and I encourage you to try out XHTML, CSS styling, and to validate your pages. Have fun !
[*] No, I'm totally unrelated to Ken Brown or AdTI :-)
Xenu brings order!