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Why You Should Use XHTML

Posted by michael on from the life-not-complicated-enough-apparently dept.

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."

10 of 657 comments (clear)

  1. Funny quote by slashdevslashtty · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

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  2. /. should lead the way by pohl · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?

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    The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...

  3. Re:XHTML and XML?? by typhoonius · · Score: 5, Informative

    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).

  4. Re:XHTML and XML?? by Kentamanos · · Score: 5, Informative

    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 :)).

  5. Re:on slashdot? by LincolnQ · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  6. It's always the way. by caluml · · Score: 5, Informative
    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.
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  7. Re:on slashdot? by MP3Chuck · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    --
    Who doesn't like free music?
  8. Re:XHTML and XML?? by JeanPaulBob · · Score: 5, Informative
    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.
  9. Re:XHTML and XML?? by RetroGeek · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  10. Re:XHTML and XML?? by wsapplegate · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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 :-)

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