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

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

On 12/5/06, Quim Gil <quimgil gmail com> wrote:
> - XHTML is the current recommendation of the W3C and they consider it an
> evolution of HTML. This has a strong weight on our project since we are
> commited to public standards.
Well then..  why not use XForms?  And XPath/XSLT?  They're all W3C
recommendations with similar support to XHTML in IE.

> - Microsoft has got time and resources to make IE compatible to XHTML and in
> fact it seems the support is there, only buried. They will have a reason for
> that, as they have reasons not to follow other standards. The reason is
> their political agenda, this agenda tries to fight... us.
Well, I really don't see a political agenda here.  From what I've
seen, they simply don't have the rendering engine to support XHTML
yet, and they don't want to fall into the same
"backwards-compatibility" trap as they did with HTML.  I'm also
assuming that they wanted to concentrate primarily on UI/security and
minor CSS improvements in IE7 (much to our disappointment).  I know
that the "oppose the big guy" argument may seem strong, but I really
don't blame the IE people for that particular decision, as it works
out much better in the long run.

As I've stated repeatedly (I really want to see how this issue can
just be ignored), we won't really be giving browsers XHTML, as both IE
and XHTML-supporting browsers will parse it as malformed HTML when
it's text/html (XHTML-supporting browsers will use XHTML if it is sent
with the correct mimetype).

Ricky