Re: [wgo] XHTML1.0 Strict vs HTML 4.01

[Ricky Zhou <ricky zhou gmail com>]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Curtis Hovey wrote:
> I have been working with these issues for a few years now. The points
> brought up are obscure an should not stop us from authoring to the
> standard that will be 7 years old in a few weeks. 
Trust me, IE support is *not* obscure.  Despite having over 6 years to
implement this, neither IE6 or IE7 support XHTML served with the correct
mimetype.
> These are issues that
> need to be addressed from time to time, but will no affect the day to
> day operation of the site. Microsoft is phasing out IE 6 and XHTML is
> not going away. We must be mindful of current issues faced with
> browsers, screen sizes, and the like and design for them, or design for
> graceful degradation.
As stated, IE7 doesn't support XHTML either.  Browser/screen sizes are
pretty irrelevant for this argument (HTML can do this), and I don't see
"rendering as tag soup with no XHTML features" as a form of graceful
degradation for XHTML.
> Send the pages with the mime-type text/html (as is common practice) to
> get the most from the current browser population. 
You mean render it with absolutely none of the benefits of XHTML?
> We can choose to send
> application/xhtml+xml to browsers that we recognize AND we believe will
> provide compelling features when our content is interpreted as modern. I
> am not aware of any compelling features in Gecko or KHTML enable with
> application/xhtml+xml.
Why not use HTML 4.01 strict if no XHTML features are necessary?
> The markup argument is disputable. The points on standards are correct,
> but the topic is about IE's non-standard compliance. The issue we face
> is how IE choose to interpret markup. IE reads the DOCTYPE to choose the
> rendering engine. It chooses the small, fast trident engine for XHTML,
> if there is an error, it fails over to the old, large, and slow IE 4/IE
> 5 engine. Valid markup displays faster. Since IE is switching the
> engines used to render, it is also switching the models (MSDOM).
> Regardless of source markup, script and CSS rules are applied to the
> active model. So long as IE is using the model you intend, there is no
> issue...reason enough to avoid errors in your markup.
I don't understand this argument at all, since the rendering engine has
been called Trident since IE4.  If you read the relevant IEBlog post
(http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/09/15/467901.aspx), it seems to
indicate that no rendering engine switching occurs, which was the
impression that I was under.

I really didn't expect a response to the sources that I posted here.
The real "core of my argument" is that we can't get/don't need any of
XHTML's features, so HTML is the best choice.  It's a perfectly good
standard that does exactly what we need in a well-supported way.

Analyzing the benefits/problems with each solution, I don't see any
benefits for XHTML, but I do see a host of possible problems/issues that
simply don't need to be dealt with in HTML.

In conclusion, I would like to see an answer to the following questions
before even considering XHTML:
* Why doesn't HTML fulfill our requirements?
* why is XHTML better than HTML for this project?

Ricky
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.5 (GNU/Linux)

iD8DBQFFc1d1iXbZ7NjlUcARAv3IAKDagEjU99vZpqzRZe9/01tFUJUCoQCgkcVg
cxWkiHY/ws+VnNxhq11QG7o=
=9RNd
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----