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

["Thilo Pfennig" <tpfennig gmail com>]

2006/12/6, Ricky Zhou <ricky zhou gmail com>:

> To reiterate, it's parsed as invalid HTML, so it's not really XHTML.

Well http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-media-types/#text-html defines:
----
The 'text/html' media type [RFC2854] is primarily for HTML, not for
XHTML.  In general, this media type is NOT suitable for XHTML.
However, as [RFC2854] says, [XHTML1] defines a profile of use of XHTML
which is compatible with HTML 4.01 and which may also be labeled as
text/html.
----
This means that it is absolutely Ok to server XHTML as text/html,
although it is no recommended. Sure a standard always sets high goals
- but here they making this exception here, because they know of the
problems.

My view is: the whole HTML/web thing keeps being a mess, no matter
what you do. So it is not possible to make thing 100% perfect. And at
least it is better to try to go to XHTML standard as to stick to old
school HTML. I have tried to make perfect standard compliant pages for
years but at some point I have switched more to the GoodEnough
approach. So if it works and there is no problem - and if we plan to
switch to more standard compliance if possible this is ok. Standard
compliance itself is no value. It should serve the user and not the
other way around.

> I don't care if you think mimetypes are stupid, it's what current browsers go by, and we
> can't change this.

Browser applications make many assumptions. They also seem to make
differences between quirks mode, standard mode and almost standard
mode.

I have not a complete knowledge of XHTML but I think the essence was
that XHTML forced some things that were free in HTML which were

* HTML tags must be lower case
* every opened tag must be closed or must be self-closing like <br />
or <img />

So XHTML mostly is more strict where HTML is very loose. There may be
some points where interpreting might be different. Maybe you like to
point them out more specific?

Thilo

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