The Long Road from XHTML to HTML

http://nimbupani.com/blog/the-long-road-from-xhtml-to-html.html

by deepakjois • 17 years ago

36 6 17 years ago

jamesbritt2• 17 years ago

So, what do folks here use?

I was a fan of XHTML for a while, largely because it made it easier to use XML tools to verify my documents. But that became a non-issue as HTML parsing tools (specifically what I could use in Ruby tools while developing) got better.

I wasn't serving my pages as application/xml, and on consideration of what Ian Hickson wrote (http://hixie.ch/advocacy/xhtml) I went back to using HTML 4.

I'm puzzled by suggestions to use HTML 5. it seems a peculiar reversal from the "design with Web 'standards'" mantra. It's not a W3C recommendation, it's still a draft.

If XHTML is not working out as planned, why not use HTML 4.0.1, a current W3C rec that works?

axod• 17 years ago

IMHO, HTML5 addresses real needs. VIDEO+AUDIO tags, awesome. Some other really useful things as well.

My money is firmly on HTML5.

Just because it's not a standard, doesn't mean it's not usable. You can already feature detect and use audio tags where available etc.

jamesbritt2• 17 years ago

"You can already feature detect and use audio tags where available etc."

OK, but isn't this the grounds for people griping about various flavors of IE, that you have to have behavior checks for X number of browsers because they do not follow a W3C rec?

nimbupani• 17 years ago

Using HTML 5 now would only mean using wellformed documents and dropping "deprecated" attributes and elements from your HTML document (e.g. not using font, cellspacing, etc attributes). You don't have to use the new elements introduced (since IE pretends such elements don't exist).

ableal• 17 years ago

This was in 2000-2003. With the gift of hindsight we know now that XML was not the future

Some people at the time tried (un)common-sense. Fortunately they took the trouble to whack the ... erm, "rough edges" out of the fashionable groupthink (e.g. http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/01/14/thought_experime... ).

Thanks to them, we now seem on the way to HTML5, which I agree it looks like a good idea.

The Long Road from XHTML to HTML

Related Stories