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."

Comments

File this in the Irony category

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot isn't even valid regular HTML, let alone XHTML, and they're running a story on why we should be using XHTML? I'd laugh if it weren't so sad.

Re:File this in the Irony category

[critter_hunter]

Rob mentionned in his journal not too long ago that he had redesigned his page using HTML+CSS and that he would like to someday do the same for Slashdot.

XHTML and XML??

[ViolentGreen]

Can someone please explain the differences between XHTML an XML?

Re:XHTML and XML??

[typhoonius]

XML is a metalanguage; that is, it's a mark-up language for writing other mark-up languages. XHTML is one such language. It's basically plain old HTML but with XML's stricter rules. I like it because it discourages sloppy coding (sort of like preferring Java over Perl).

Other XML languages include SVG (for vector graphics), WML (for simple web pages designed for cell phones; never really took off), and RSS (for news feeds).

Re:XHTML and XML??

[volteface]

While HTML is an implementation of SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language), XHTML is an implementation of XML (Extensible Markup Language, which is a subset of SGML used for describing different types data).

Basically as long as HTML follows the syntax structure of SGML correctly it is considered valid, but XHTML must follow the rules of XML correctly in order to be valid.

Re:XHTML and XML??

[Kentamanos]

XML is a pretty generic set of format rules. There are LOTS of various formats that are implemented in XML (SVG, XHTML, XSLT for some popular examples).

XHTML applies the rules of XML to HTML. For instance you can have one root node, you have to close all tags, attributes have to have single or double quotes around their values, etc.

Writing something that parses XHTML is a LOT simpler than writing something that parses HTML. It's also easier to confirm you've written it properly (using schemas for instance, which are also written in XML :)).

Re:XHTML and XML??

[pete-classic]

Good answer ;-)

The grandparent might also interested in the following:

XHTML is implemented in XML. So XHTML is to XML as OpenOffice.org's writer format is to XML. (Or as HTML is to SGML, or as this post is to English.)

People often say somthing is XML when it is really implemented in XML. Using that (misleading) terminology XHTML is XML.

-Peter

Re:XHTML and XML??

[JeanPaulBob]

No one seems to have explained this point sufficiently, so I'll give it a go. (The other posts give correct information--but incomplete.)

XML looks a lot like HTML. If you look at any XML or HTML document, you'll see a bunch of tags--a word or phrase or letter surrounded by greater than/less than symbols--perhaps with text in the middle. For example, here's basic HTML:

<p>The quick brown fox said, <i>"Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet."</i></p>

Your web-browser sees the <p> tag and interprets everything between it and the closing </p> tag as a paragraph. The text is formatted accordingly, with line breaks before and after. Similarly, the browser knows to show everything between the <i> and </i> tags--which are nested inside the <p> tags--using italics instead of standard formatting. Other tags include <img> for images; an image tag also has attribute inside the tag to specify the image to be shown. For example:

<img src="mypic.jpg">

That's HTML. XML is structured in pretty much the same way. Tags are used to give meaning to text in a systematic way, attributes can be included, tags can be nested, etc. For instance, you might store information for an address book in the following tags:

<entry>
<name>
<firstName>Joss</firstName>
<lastName>Whedon</lastName>
<title>Mr.</title>
</name>
<address>
<streetNum>1324</streetNum>
<street>Mulholland Dr.</street>
etc.
</address>
</entry>
<entry>
info for another person
</entry>

Then you would write a program that parses the data and displays it onscreen or saves it to your PDA or whatever.

The key difference between XML and HTML or XHTML is that XML tags have no inherent meaning. You can use any text you want as a tag name, with a few limitations (no spaces, for instance). There are no assigned tag names like there are in HTML, where a <p> mean paragraph, and <b> means bold, etc. In the above example, you could change "entry" to "stickyWicket" if you want. XML data is meant to be interpreted by a machine, not a person--though meaningful tag names are obviously more convienient than random junk like "xkljad".

As the other posts say, XML has some stricter rules than HTML. For instance, in HTML, there's a tag <br> for a line break. It doesn't have a closing tag--you just put it anywhere you want a new line to start. In XML, every tag has to have a closing tag--though you can combine both the opening and closing tags using the / symbol. You can use that to make your XML more concise. For instance, the <name> tag above with nested <firstName> and <lastName> could be simplified to this:

<name first="Joss" last="Whedon" title="Mr." />

People have used XML to define all sorts of formats, from music notation to images. All that means is that they decided on a tag structure with meaningful tag names and nesting, and published the rule set. Then anyone can write applications to deal with that data. XHTML is just the old HTML tag with the strict XML rules. So, in XHTML, a line break is <br />.

To sum up, XML is just a way to structure data systematically. XHTML is an XML document with particular tags intended for a web browser.

Re:XHTML and XML??

[Christianfreak]

You're kidding right?

First off, Ma and Pa Kettle haven't cranked out their own web page in notepad since about '97 or so. Nowadays they use FrontPage for that which produces something akin to code soup.

Secondly I don't understand why new syntax precludes anyone. Learning new things is not difficult. I write valid XHTML 1 code by hand, it isn't very hard, in fact its much easier to control the elements than it used to be, and produce nice looking sites that downgrade nicely for people using broken (IE) browsers.

It makes everyone's life easier if there is a standard that is followed. You don't expect a programming language to know what to do with invalid syntax do you? Why should your data language be any different?

Re:XHTML and XML??

[canon006]

Good descriptions so far, lemme add my two cents. A professor I had put it this way, "XML is more like a set of rules than a language; XHTML, SVG, etc are languages built using those rules."

I always thought it was a good way to think of the relationship.

Re:XHTML and XML??

[Cereal Box]

How do you know that? Did you actually write both an HTML and an XHTML parser?

I'll tell you why it's easier to parse XHTML than HTML: if you're sure you've got well-formed XHTML data, then ALL you need to "parse" XHTML (that is, get it in a document tree format) is an XML parser, which someone else has conveniently written. Compare this with parsing HTML, which requires hacks to compensate for HTML's looser rules (i.e., elements like <p> and <br> which don't need to be closed off, etc.).

Now rendering XHTML is another story altogether, but there is no doubt that parsing XHTML is FAR easier than parsing HTML.

Re:XHTML and XML??

[RetroGeek]

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??

Re:XHTML and XML??

[elFarto the 2nd]

Perl I believe

Regards
elFarto

Re:XHTML and XML??

[wsapplegate]

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 :-)

You have to wonder...

[Dozix007]

You have to wonder if Microsoft will be implimenting this new standard in IE. I have done some webdevelopment and have really noticed that they rarely impliment any of the standards in there browser. Not to mention that they are on the board that approves these standards :P

on slashdot?

[einstein]

anyone else amused that this article was posted on slashdot? a site who's HTML is so bad they've blocked validator? I'm amused.

Re:on slashdot?

[LincolnQ]

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.

Re:on slashdot?

[MP3Chuck]

You weren't kidding when you said "a lot" ... damn!

For those who didn't RTFA the parent post had, it restructures /. with XHTML and CSS. Bottom line:
* Savings per day without caching the CSS files: ~3.15 GB bandwidth
* Savings per day with caching the CSS files: ~14 GB bandwidth

And the traffic figure they used was from June 2000. Do the math.

Re:on slashdot?

[jCaT]

14gb * 30 days = 420gb, which equates to about 1.5mbit sustained per month. With what slashdot is paying for bandwidth, that SHOULD be about $150 a month. Not exactly an amazing drop for them in price. It's not hard to see why they haven't bothered.

However, It sounds like are working on getting slashdot to be more standards compliant.

Re:on slashdot?

[liquidsin]

The "editors" here are supposed to be geeks. Every geek I know is all about doing their preferred geeky thing in the most efficient way possible. You'd think they'd want to do it just to say "yeah, we rewrote the site and saved 14GB of transfer PER DAY". Not only does it save them money, it saves the users load times. Besides, it's not like they have any actual editing to do.

Re:on slashdot?

[blanks]

Its been done http://www.alistapart.com/articles/slashdot/ Its happening now http://www.slashcode.com/plugins/04/03/04/0229237. shtml?tid=4&tid=24&tid=28 Big update in next few months in the cvs http://www.slashcode.com/ Yes its not here now, but it sounds like slashdot will be XHTML compliant soon. If you dont like it, fix it, public CVS. Dont bitch, change it your self.

Funny quote

[slashdevslashtty]

Which browsers accept the media type application/xhtml+xml? Browsers known to us include all Mozilla-based browsers, such as Mozilla, Netscape 5 and higher, Galeon and Firefox, as well as Opera, Amaya, Camino, Chimera, DocZilla, iCab, Safari, and all browsers on mobile phones that accept WAP2. In fact, any modern browser. Most accept XHTML documents as application/xml as well. See the XHTML Media-type test for details. Does Microsoft Internet Explorer accept the media type application/xhtml+xml? No.

Re:Funny quote

[JamesKPolk]

Let's see what the MS apologists have to say about that. If their browser is so great, why can't they handle docs that use the W3C-recommended mime-type?

Of course, I'd like to see what the people who call Google a great, loving, standards-obeying company would say to the fact that Google can't handle application/xhtml+xml either?

Before I added a special-case hack to send my pages go Google as text/html (thus violating the W3C mime-type recommendation), Google would not read the content of my pages, and would offer to show an "HTML version" of my XHTML which was actually blank.

Is this really going to happen?

[Defiler]

I've been using XHTML for some time, but only in the modes that safely fall back to HTML for browsers that don't "speak" XHTML.
I have to wonder if 2.0 is going to catch on. Internet Explorer isn't likely to support it any time soon, and nobody wants to code two versions of every web application.
Still, good FAQ on that site. I learned some details that had been hazy.

Mozilla composer

[Danathar]

It would be nice if Mozilla composer could save in XHTML....I'd gladly use it if more editors would save in XHTML format.

/. should lead the way

[pohl]

With all the time we spend hearing about alternatives to IE around here, you would think that slashdot would be compliant to at least some W3C standard. If /. were some tiny hobby weblog this would be forgivable, but /. could use the size of it's audience to actually lead. Why not do it?

Why You Should Use XHTML 2.0 ????

[stonebeat.org]

XHTML 2.0 almost forces you to seperate "content" from "presentation". Which is a good thing.

Something better would be to use pure XML for creating content and then let the browser apply a CSS to present the content.
See Mozilla + CSS + XML = Structured + Formatted Content for more info.

Re:Why You Should Use XHTML 2.0 ????

[JimDabell]

Something better would be to use pure XML for creating content and then let the browser apply a CSS to present the content.

No, that would be very much worse. The whole point of a publically specified XML application like XHTML is that everybody understand what the element types mean. If you go around inventing your own element types, nobody will no what you mean. Google understands <h1> as being more important than normal text. It won't understand <my-fancy-heading> in the same way.

Re:Why You Should Use XHTML 2.0 ????

[Stuart Gibson]

OK, I'm sure you're trolling, but how is XHTML any harder to understand than HTML 4?

Since they use practically identical tags and are structured in the same way, a well written (ie compliant) HTML 4 page will comply to XHTML with a change of doctype and a few minor tweaks (<br> to <br /> etc).

Anyone who is in any way competent with HTML can switch to XHTML with no problem. In fact, for less technical people, XHTML will be easier to understand as the reams of presentation code will have been shifted to the CSS file, making the underlying (X)HTML easier to read and understand document structure.

If I'm completely off base about where you're coming from, please enlighten me.

Stuart

It's always the way.

[caluml]

From the FAQ:

Which browsers accept the media type application/xhtml+xml?

Browsers known to us include all Mozilla-based browsers, such as Mozilla, Netscape 5 and higher, Galeon and Firefox, as well as Opera, Amaya, Camino, Chimera, DocZilla, iCab, Safari, and all browsers on mobile phones that accept WAP2. In fact, any modern browser. Most accept XHTML documents as application/xml as well. See the XHTML Media-type test for details.

Does Microsoft Internet Explorer accept the media type application/xhtml+xml?

No. However, there is a trick that allows you to serve XHTML1.0 documents to Internet Explorer as application/xml.

Include at the top of your document the line in bold here:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="copy.xsl"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transition al.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>

where copy.xsl is a file that contains the following:

<stylesheet version="1.0"
xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
&am p;n bsp; <template match="/">
<copy-of select="."/>
</template>
</stylesheet>

Note that this file must be on the same site as the document referring to it.

But can it resist commercialization?

[kindbud]

Meaning it is to be used for document structuring which is why it does not have presentation elements.

That's what they said about HTML in 1992. Look what happened to it when it got popular: bastardized so badly with presentation elements that it lost almost all of its structuring features. Remember <fig>? It was obsoleted before it even made it out of draft status because commercial browser vendors (*cough* Netscape *cough*) pushed <img align> on everyone instead, because it was quick and easy. That's just one example. Who's to say this new XHTML won't be spoiled the same way? We could say "Use HTML if precise control over layout is needed" but back in the HTML days, we were saying "use PDF if precise control is needed" and we were ignored, and HTML was destroyed so badly that XHTML is now needed to fill the role HTML had to abandon.

What's to prevent lather/rinse/repeat?

XML on web sites sucks

[laird]

Nope, you're right.

I'll go out on a limb and say that using XML as the document format for web site production is a terrible idea. XML is a great data exchange language between systems, but it's insanely inefficient for use within a single system. All of XML's positive attributes (self documenting, robust, extensible, supports encodings, validation, use XSLT to do transforms between arbitrary XML representations of data, etc.) are all important between loosely coupled systems. But those issues don't occur within a single system, and the overhead of using XML is immense. It's orders of magnitude faster to query a datbase directly than to parse XML, transform, etc.

Re:XML on web sites sucks

[Kentamanos]

You guys are both essentially complaining about the speed of XSLT transforms. While XHTML makes "HTML" a valid XSLT target target document (in other words, it makes HTML XML compliant), nobody is forcing you to use XSLT.

XHTML is still completely valid on its own. It's a HELL of a lot easier to validate for one thing. Ever looked at the sourcecode to HTML validators?

No, XHMTL is broken

[AuMatar]

You forget the original purpose of HTML. HTML's purpose, and the reason it grew so quikly, was to be an easily understood markup language that could be used by less technical people. The reason so many people were able to make their own homepages and grow the web like they did was that HTML could be easily learned.

Now we have XHTML and CSS. Neither of these are easy to learn. Neither of them is easy to use. Less technical people are incapable of using either. This is great for job security for webmasters, but for the growtrh of the next and for the internet as a medium of free and easy communication its horrible. XHTML is broken as an HTML replacesment because it does not meet the original purpose of HTML- to be something that anyone can easily learn and use.

Re:No, XHMTL is broken

[T-Ranger]

I dont know that that was HTMLs purpose. I keep hearing people say that, and it being "easy" may be true, but I dont know that that was its goal.

HTML is NOT easy. Writing a valid HTML documenta 20-30 lines long by hand is possible, but for any non-trivial page it is near impossible. (that there are no good HTML editors is besides the point). Any website containing more then 1 page should use some kind of automation to create HTML, be that continiously generated dynamic pages, or generating the HTML once per change. Spreading the rumor that HTML is easy to learn and that anyone can, and should, use HTML is a disservice to humanity.

If you are a non-technical person, or even a technical person whose job is not specificly HTML creation software writing, then you should not generate HTML by hand. Use some kind of CMS. Use some HTML editor. Use Docbook and "compile" HTML.

Why are Wiki's popular? Because they use a markup language that actually is easy, one that is hard to screw up.

Please, pleae, please, dont continue to spread the lie that HTML is easy enough for anyone to learn.

Re:Ugh

[Ambrose]

It is because HTML is so lax that we have the browser support nightmare we're in today. I would trade making it harder for the average newb to make a web page for consistent (or at least predictable) rendering across browsers.

Not to mention accessibility. The vast majority of sites out there are all but completely useless to the blind, or those who require very large print, or who are browsing on PDAs, cellphones, or other small devices.

The new standards are a Good Thing, and if that means gramma can't hand-code her photo gallery page (and you know, there are a lot of grammas out there that do that know) I'm not going to lose any sleep over it.

Re:Ugh

[JohnnyCannuk]

Do you remember that web pages in 1996 look like shit?

Do remember that web development these days cannot rely on simple static text?

Do you realize that with HTML/XHTML editing tools around these days, it doesn't matter?

Right tool for the job, my friend. A text editor is for writing static text. HTML/XHTML tools are used for making web pages and interfaces.

Just because there's "doc types and CSS" out there doesn't mean you have to use them - go ahead and write crappy looking pages in notepad, just becasue you can. But if you are going to do proper, standard, stylish web development that is a good experience for the user, you may need to know some of this stuff.

Clearly you aren't a web developer.

Re:Ugh

[BlaKnail]

"Worse, HTML used to be fairly forgiving for the author so Newbies could get a decent page without spending hours and hours trying to figure out why their page is coming up blank or trying to figure out why the validator is complaining at them."

HTML being forgiving is a bad thing. Sure, it's easier for the average person to crank out a homepage, but without strict standards, we ended up with a myriad of browser incompatibilities and mountains of sloppy coding that can't be parsed correctly.

XML and XHTML really are a godsend.

WYSIWYG Implementation

[beejay54]

I think that so long as the WYSIWYG community keeps implementing these standards into their applications, web developers will follow suit. The latest version of Dreamweaver codes excellent XHTML and almost forces designers/developers to use CSS to incorperate presentation elements out of the box. For those who code 100% manually XHTML is an easy thing to tackle. The big issue it seems is that, like many web developers out there, I am getting quite sick of the frustration in multiple browser support. While it may be the most popular browser, IE is quite possibly one of the worst for supporting standards. I don't mind Microsoft trying to develop their own web standards so long as they are 'implementable' in other browsers/systems, but that never happens.

Most web developers don't need it

[JimDabell]

The only version of XHTML that is suitable for transmission as text/html is XHTML 1.0 following Appendix C. XHTML transmitted in this fashion doesn't have any of the benefits of mixed namespaces, stricter parsing, etc.

You get these benefits when you serve XHTML as application/xhtml+xml, and your visitors use browsers that support those features (such visitors are extremely rare - SVG isn't even in main Mozilla builds yet). But many legacy user-agents require text/html. Search engines would probably be the most important ones.

So unless you are willing to set up content-negotiation, sending different document types to different browsers, and unless you have a niche market that use browsers that understand these new features, you really aren't going to get anything from XHTML. Not for a few years, anyway.

Re:Ugh

[Kentamanos]

I would argue learning XHTML is easier than HTML since the rules are a LOT more straightforward.

XHTML/CSS is picking up steam...

[Saeger]

I've been "coding" to XHTML transitional for a few years now, and have noticed recently that a lot of the sites being created or redesigned now are also opting for it rather than the old HTML401.

There's really not much to it:

• All tags are lowercase, which is easier to type anyway
• All attributes have to be "quoted" for sanity
• All tags have to be terminated, like this lists </li> which makes the browsers job of rendering much easier since it doesn't have to play the guessing game. This is especially handy on lowend devices like PDAs.
• All the old bandwidth-wasting presentation elements (like <FONT>) are now CSS presentation ATTRIBUTES of any element by using id= class= and style=

Firefox's WebDeveloper extension makes XHTML/CSS validation (among other funcs) so easy that there's no excuse to be lazy about it.

--

Warning: not for real web designers!

[orthogonal]

Also they have a FAQ about why you should use XHTML over HTML.
Meaning it is to be used for document structuring which is why it does not have presentation elements.

What! No <blink> tag?? No

No way I using it!11!1 I'm a serious web designer!

(This comment looks best at 717x913 resolution, using Internet Explorer for the security holes and that essential <marquee> tag. Page designed in Microsoft Word, because that HTML stuff makes my head swim. Enhanced with buggy JavaScript we stole off some Russian porn site, to resize your browser window, make its controls inaccessible, ensure the "security" of our images by disabling right-click, and to reject any browsers other than Netscape 4.72 and IE 5.5. Please bookmark this comment and come back when we've made the entire comment one big Flash animation completely inaccessible to anyone not running Flash or running Flash but on dial-up. PS: we appreciate your business.)

A Case for the use of XHTML

[Llevar]

HTML versus XML and the related set of schemas, including XHTML, can be compared to building with Lego versus real construction materials. HTML comes out of the realm of the old web where everyone and their uncle can be a so-called "web designer", a title anyone in the industry knows to actually refer to a graphic artist who draws buttons and banners. Coding in HTML revolves around nudging table cells by a few pixels this way or that way and hoping that all falls in place on that old piece of crap browser that half of the customers of your company are still using for some reason. HTML can be written by a 5-year-old. Some see this as an advantage, those who use it professionally can't see it as anything but a shame. I've known my fair share of web developers, being one myself, and the number of them who know anyhing about actual software development is probably less than one percent of the total.

XML, and all the web-related schemas and standards like XHTML, on the other hand, provide you with an ability to present very complex business domains over the internet. Anyone wno knows anything about programming will say that jumbling all your data, along with it's structure, along with it's presentation is a terrible way to write software. The new standards allow one to keep data separate (XML), structure separate (XHTML), and presentation separate (CSS). While it's admittedly more complex than the regular HTML it lets you do so much more with your data. Switch stylesheets and bam, your site looks completely different. Switch XSL stylesheets and you can serve the same data in completely different ways on a PC, a PDA, or a mobile phone.

Lastly I want to bring up that web clients are often used as front ends for company intranets and while it's going to be a while until web developers (and consumers!!!) will be able to enjoy the benefits of the move to XML on www those benefits can already be reaped in the controlled environment of your company intranet.

Re:Ugh

[trisweb]

Clearly you aren't a web developer.

Most of the web developers I know (and I know a lot) started out using tools like Dreamweaver and GoLive etc, which now output decent XHTML, but now they are starting to move toward XHTML and CSS in their designs (which are some of the best on the net, might I add), and they're switching to using text editors exclusively for writing the code, plus your standard graphics programs for the images. I do the same.

The great thing about XHTML is that is separates the content from the design, which in turn makes your code beautiful and easy to write and maintain. I was looking at an XHTML page I had written the other day, and I thought, gee, I could just put this up as plain text and people would still understand it. It was free of all that contextual crap (tables, font tags, one-pixel spacer images) that heavily-designed HTML pages of two years ago were full of. So no, a text editor is not just for writing static text. I use mine for every aspect of the design process, though, admittedly ConTEXT is not notepad, it's pretty close. And I would contest that the sites I develop aren't crappy looking.

You may be able to design sites with a tailored WYSIWYG HTML editor, but you usally have little control over how everything fits together, and it results in messy code that is hard to understand. If that works for you, then fine, great. All I can say is that you better "know some of this stuff" and how to do it without your XHTML editor -- learn it in notepad -- and then, once you see what was output by your editor, and if you have any respect for the XHTML standard and the ideals that the W3C had in mind when they thought of it, I have a feeling you won't go back.

CGI.pm

[mishan]

I don't know about you guys, but my pages are already written in XHTML 1.0 and, thanks to CGI.pm, all I need to get my pages up to the XHTML 2.0 spec is a newer version of CGI.pm which would be provided through a newer Perl distribution.

Ah portability..

Re:Ugh

[kirkjobsluder]

Gee, am I the only one who has been writing xhtml in vim for a while now?

It's not that hard to do.

1: add the doctype at the top.
2: always close your tags.
3: check you work with a validator.

html tidy will also identify and clean up any mistakes.

Re:why you *should* use XHTML

[Laebshade]

Why should you encourage XHTML?

• Readability: XHTML is readable as long as it is structured correctly. Note: That doesn't mean having everything on one line.
• XHTML can be done with a plain text editor just like regular HTML, though as always, it's best to use a text editor that at least has syntax highlighting.

I code valid XHTML nearly everday as a freakin' hobby. There's 3 useful things I've come to know:

• Make it structured and it is easily readable. Tabs, line breaks, and spaces in appropriate places.
• A text editor with syntax highlighting. A must.
• Ok, so I forgot what the third was.

The above is true for nearly all programming. Slashdot, home of the all-knowing arrogant beings.

Tranesterification

[Graymalkin]

One huge problem I've encountered trying to switch pages from HTML 4.01 to XHTML is more established engines tend to hail from the HTML 3.2 days (Slashcode) and have not evolved much since. Forum software is often the worst in my experience, everything is littered with tables and fixed size elements. A lot of people host their sites on vhosts and many of those don't support things like HTML::Template, Mason, or Smarty. As such most coders just write their own template system which may or may not handle newer web standards.

Since many sites are using crappy HTML they want to spice up they tend to use equally crappy JavaScript to add little stylistic features. I think many people are surprised when they hit up a CSS tutorial and figure out they can replace their stylistic JavaScript with CSS and have much better performing web pages.

I'd love to see more sites using XHTML, even transitional XHTML, with CSS for styling and layout purposes. Documents end up much more flexible and quite a bit smaller. It is also easier for end users to override the page's CSS with their own to either make elements more legible or friendlier for their output device (PDA, cell phone, screen reader).

Coders of CMS engines: Please use sane template systems so it is easier for your poor end users to make their pages better comply with web standards. Also don't wrap stuff in tables, not everyone uses tables to lay out their pages! Presentation logic is fine and dandy but don't hard code layout elements, let the users decide! Thank You.

Re:Oh God, not again...

[the endless]

why don't they fix CSS first and try doing something GOOD, like making the id and name attributes the same or both handled in CSS and javascript

The id and name attributes aren't meant to be the same. The name attribute is used for naming form controls, and (for example) this means that all radio buttons that are meant to be part of the same set all have the same name. Since the id attribute is meant to contain a unique identifier, making them the same would mean either [a] making it impossible to group radio buttons, since their names would need to be unique, or [b] making it impossible to grab an element by it's unique identifier, since ids can't be unique if you want to group radio buttons. Which would you prefer, exactly?

Re:Has anyone tried coding a site in pure XHTML/CS

[shift1978]

So you say that website with tables used for design are more easy to read ? Are you sure ?
Have you ever work on the website of another person, company, project using table for design ? It sis totally impossible to maintain it without losing much time.

Now about the goal of a website, it is not to look good but to provide information. Now if it look beautiful too it is better. But information is the main point and accessibility - I mean information for everybody (blind persons, persons using their mobile phone,...) With tables for design accessibiliy is not possible

Foolow this link http://www.humanfactors.com/downloads/chocolateaud io.asp and listen what a blind person can ear when a website use unecessary tables.

Moreover XHTML is more easily readable than XHTML for web-engine. With the separation of content and design you win lot's of bandwidth. Etc.

All my websites now use XHTML and CSS and I am very happy with this. It work perfectly and I win so much time than bfore using tables. I can change the look of all my website by changing one file. Do this with table and without server languages (PHP,ASP,...).

XHTML rox ! CSS rox ! HTML will die slowly :)