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

["Christian Rose" <menthos gnome org>]

On 12/4/06, Ricky Zhou <ricky zhou gmail com> wrote:
[...]
> 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?

For all intents and purposes, the mime type issue with XHTML is mostly
a non-issue, as already explained by Curtis in this thread. Yes, you
can't use all the benefits of XHTML today given IE's crappy support.
Is it a reason to avoid XHTML? I believe not.

In one commercial web project I helped develop not too many years ago,
we early on decided on using XHTML. Was it mandated by our boss? Did
he even care? Nope on both accounts. Were we developers ourselves
deciding that XHTML 1.0 Strict was the future, even limited by the
IE-enforced 'text/html' mime type? You bet we were.
We were also obsessed with a lot of other things, like having dynamic
content produce nice and clean and well-indented readable HTML, and
other things that made us sleep well at night, but which obviously our
boss would not be overly concerned about.

A year passed, and this was totally a non-issue, even in production.
Then, a year later, we had to recruit a new developer (this was a
fairly small project). We were iterating through a lot of people until
we finally found a potential new developer. When called to an
interview, this developer after a while admitted that not only had he
in advance carefully examined the HTML for our site, he had also
validated it, and was pleasanly surprised that the whole layout was
valid XHTML 1.0 Strict. What he then went on to say surprised me even
more: This was one of the most important factors for him being
interested in the job, besides the obvious factors of pay, benefits
and so on. Our site being clean and supportive of modern web standards
was giving him as a developer a warm and comforting feeling of a
project that he would be interested in joining.

Yes, this person was probably only one of the 0.00000..1% or less
visitors that would ever notice or care that our site was valid XHTML
1.0 Strict. But at this time, we were really happy that it had helped
us attract a skilled person to our project.

GNOME not being only for the end users, but also for all the
sysadmins, ISV:s, and all other technical decision makers out there, I
think this is even more important for GNOME. Just as nice logos and
artwork may attract some people, and nice well written docs some
others, some nice modern standards-supportive code behind the site may
make some few visitors more confident that we aim to support modern
standards. And it may be the visitors we care the most about, because
it is them who make GNOME spread on thousands of installations world
wide.


Christian