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

["Ricky Zhou" <ricky zhou gmail com>]

On 12/5/06, Thilo Pfennig <tpfennig gmail com> wrote:
> 2. This is a bit of a hen and egg problem: If no one implements XHTML
> in websites the support will be less good and if the support is less
> good no one will use it at websites. This is the same thing with CSS.
> I have used CSS as soon as the first browsers supported it - this was
> a total mess. The situation today is much, much, much better than
> 1997-2000 where there were really ugly browser wars and
> incompatibility was widespread.
First: Can anybody please address the point that it's not XHTML if
it's sent as HTML?  A browser will simply treat it as invalid HTML, so
*we won't really be giving XHTML!*  (The "XHTML" sites that you
mention are not treated as such, so they don't have problems).
Also: The browsers that you spoke of actually supported CSS (yes, sent
as CSS), so the issue is slightly different there.

Everybody's saying that XHTML is good enough, but why isn't HTML good
enough?  When XHTML is supported, we can move to that easily, but
until then, I'd stick with HTML.

Everybody seems to be denying the fact that HTML is a perfectly modern
standard (w3 recommendations for HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0 were about 1
month part).  The reason that IE isn't supporting XHTML yet (as the IE
blog says: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/09/15/467901.aspx) is
as follows:
"... if we tried to support real XHTML in IE 7 we would have ended up
using our existing HTML parser (which is focused on compatibility) and
hacking in XML constructs.  It is highly unlikely we could support
XHTML well in this way; in particular, we would certainly not detect a
few error cases here or there, and we would silently support invalid
cases."
They will be supporting XHTML once they have a parser that actually
takes advantage of it, so the progress is already coming.  At this
point, there's already no way that IE can avoid supporting XHTML in
future versions, so we don't have to worry about the progress issue.

I may be stubborn, but I haven't been thoroughly and logically shot down yet.
Ricky