Re: XHTML or HTML 4 ?

On 16/01/2006 03:10, cwdjrxyz wrote:

Michael Winter wrote:

On 13/01/2006 21:43, cwdjrxyz wrote:

[Around 6KB of needlessly quoted text]

Please learn how to post; trim quotes.

I quite well know how to trim quotes [...] 

Then please be kind enough to do it in future.

Since the poster asked a variety of questions that I thought might be
best covered by an example [...]


Your posted was related to only the first question.

[snipped pointless drivel about bandwidth]

This is Usenet, not the Web. It is a simple courtesy to keep bandwidth usage to a minimum and follow the preferred posting style of the group.

[snip]

"Bad example" is a value judgement taken alone, and is meaningless in a
technical example without technical specifics.

I have no problem mentioning the in-line CSS declarations, the absolute positioning, the pixel dimensions (and font size), the useless and inaccurate META element, and the generally poor markup (the worst of which is that block of text to the right). However, that wasn't the point of your example, so I just hinted at the presence of other issues.

Your follow up technical specific concerns the mime2.php file. It is
doing exactly what I want it to do - namely serve
application/xhtml+xml to any browser that claims it will accept it at
all.


As both David and I have said, that isn't what it does at all.

Some claim they would rather have html, but I want to bypass that
when at all possible.


Stop wanting that, then.

[...] bugs, such as the CSS background-color bug for Mozilla family
browsers [...]

The BODY element is rendered just like any other block-level element, and only extends to surround content that is in normal flow. As such, the background colour will not be rendered across the entire viewport. The HTML element is the document root, and setting a background colour there will cause it to be rendered as you'd prefer.

I suspect the fact that many browsers respond that they will accept
application/xhtml+xml, but prefer html, is just to protect the
browser vendors from complaints caused by a few bugs that can turn up
at this early stage.

Mozilla only states that it prefers XHTML so that resources that would negotiate between, say, HTML and XHTML with MathML, would choose the latter[1]. Opera ranks XHTML and HTML the same. I don't know off-hand what Konqueror's and Safari's Accept header contains.

Irrespective of their reported preferences, all of these browsers do, for some reason or another, prefer HTML. Mozilla cannot incrementally render XHTML. Opera 7.x wouldn't execute scripts in XHTML documents. Previous Konqueror versions, as I recall, didn't parse XHTML as XML.

[snip]

And of course CSS will not work on all browsers, but now only a tiny
percentage of very old browsers.

With a properly marked-up document, it won't matter that much if CSS is not supported (or disabled); the document will be unstyled, but still readable and in a logical order.

[snip]

The point of the large comment is to complain that IE is out of step
with most other modern browsers and W3C standards.

And how exactly does that help the user (especially as they won't read it, anyway)?

My little comment may not help much, but if enough people complain
about Microsoft's lack of support of application/xhtml+xml [...]

Microsoft should be left to implement XHTML properly in their own time. Rushing their efforts will do far more harm than good.

[snip]

Mike


[1] <http://www.mozilla.org/docs/web-developer/faq.html#accept>

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Michael Winter
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