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

["Thilo Pfennig" <tpfennig gmail com>]

2006/12/8, Ricky Zhou <ricky zhou gmail com>:
>  why go against recommendations when
> there's another perfectly valid standard that we can follow?

At some point HTML4 will not be supported by browsers any more. That
might be far away, but another standard that does exist and may be
soon (1-2 years) be much better than HTML4. We then will not have to
go through a conversion process which would sure be painful. HTML4 is
a dead end that will for some more years but has many disadvantages
(parsing, no xml compatibility) that will be more and more visibile.
To see the whole website issue just from the point of today is a bit
shortsighted. I would agree that if we want to present  one page for
TODAY sure HTML4 would be more optimal. But the thing is that we are
going to build a huge website where we do not want to change course
maybe when we do not want it. The change of mime-type is a simple web
server setting that can be changed in seconds - to convert from HTML4
to XHTML could take weeks or months, because there is no easy
conversion. We would have to make a HTML that is quasi XHTML (more
than strict).

> > 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.
> Why not just aim for as perfect as possible

In my experience if you try that only leeds to complications and is
very time consuming (to cancel the last 2% of bugs from 98%). It is
much better to farsighted and advance in some aspects, so you can
concentrate on other things in some years. The CMS is taking a lot of
ressources now and I think it should not do so in the future.

The only argument that I've seen from you is that sending XHTML as
text/html would be necessary (not having IE to ignore the pages) but
not following the recommendations. I have not seen one fact to which
problems using XHTML that is not interpreted 100% as this would lead.
The only thing I have found is that you can NOT assume UTF-8 as the
default and have to set it in the page, which is anyway a good idea.

So from my part i think we can close this thread as no new arguments
are exchanged.

Thilo
--
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