HTML or XHTML: Does It Really Matter?

http://www.sitepoint.com/article/html-or-xhtml-does-it-matter

by ajbatac • 18 years ago

10 13 18 years ago

Only use XHTML when you need to have your content parsed as XML. Otherwise, there is nothing wrong at all with well-formed HTML.

aaronblohowiak2• 18 years ago

the opposite should be your strategy because XHTML is more easily machine read, and thus more easily repurposed (and therefore, a more powerful storage/interchange format). use XHTML so your content can be parsed as XML unless you have a specific and clear reason to abandon easy machine readability.

trevelyan• 18 years ago

That also makes it easier for others to repackage/repurpose/mash.

simonw• 18 years ago

Tools like BeautifulSoup (Python) and hpricot (Ruby) make processing HTML just as easy as processing XML.

juanpablo• 18 years ago

"For an invalid XML document, browsers did not even make an attempt to parse the document as best they could, as they would with HTML—instead, they just displayed a validation error and stopped".

Yes that is the idea: Force developers to write valid code.

bdt• 18 years ago

Why force them?

flashgordon• 18 years ago

isnt all this chaos with interoperable, semi-compatible enough for you???

aaronblohowiak2• 18 years ago

the alternative is that people become reliant, then, on the implementations guess as to what the person meant. in order to still call such a thing a standard, you'd also have to standardize the guesswork involved in correcting people's mistakes. this would lead to a very large and cumbersome "standard" that violates principals of minimalism and least power. that being said, you can bet your bottom dollar that programs like "tidy" are really useful sometimes =D

axod3• 18 years ago

That would be an excellent idea if browsers actually stuck to standards and didn't have any bugs. Unfortunately that will never happen, so developers are forced to write invalid code.

Also XHTML doesn't allow tons of useful things.

olavk• 18 years ago

How are these things connected? I don't know of any browser bugs where the workaround includes writing non-well formed code.

And what useful things does XHTML not allow (which HTML allow)?

newt0311• 18 years ago

"XHTML is still worth using, because it’s a transitional standard that moves us towards a pure-XML Web. XML is inherently better than SGML, because it’s simpler and stricter, and much easier to parse (once you’ve understood its rules)."

This is where I have a problem. In my experience, one can either have a format designed for computers or humans. XML is badly designed for both. Humans don't like it for its unnecessary strictness (unnecessary because SGML can be parsed in a decidable fashion) and computers don't like it because of all the extraneous characters. Where does that leave XML?

axod3• 18 years ago

It leaves XML as a dead duck. Sure legacy things will use it, and corporations will probably still love it, but it's had its day thank god.

HTML or XHTML: Does It Really Matter?

Related Stories