[thelist] xhtml conversion

[Jonathan_A_McPherson at rl.gov]

Sort of.

I'm sure you already knew this, but XHTML is not table-less -- you're just
restricted from using tables for doing things other than presenting tabular
data. No *layout* tables.

The big question is what you mean by "most browsers" and what you mean by
"view."

Most of the browsers with heavy market share (read: IE 5+) have debatably
workable support for CSS/XHTML. But some browsers (NS 4.x, for instance,
which is still in considerable use) do a horrible job rendering CSS. If you
do your layouts entirely with CSS, you will experience weirdness and
downright ugliness in older browsers.

If by "view" you mean "be able to read the information on the page" then
you're in luck. But if by "view" you mean "look pixel-precise to my design,"
you're probably not going to have much joy, especially if you're shooting
for a heterogeneous browser market. Many older browsers render layout and
formatting CSS very poorly.

This is no problem if you are leaning on <TABLE>/<IMG SRC="spacer.gif"> for
layout and <FONT> for formatting; technically speaking, those tags are in
XHTML. *However*, pure XHTML requires the logical separation of content from
presentation and layout (using CSS), and some old browsers (including, I
suspect, IE3 and WebTV) simply will not do a good job rendering it in a
pretty fashion. Graceful degradation will be the best you can shoot for.

Jonathan.



-----Original Message-----
From: George Klingenhoffer [mailto:georgeklingenhoffer at hotmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, May 08, 2002 12:05 PM
To: Thelist at Lists. Evolt. Org
Subject: [thelist] xhtml conversion


I remember reading awhile back about browser compatibility issues with
XHTML.  If I convert all my HTML to XHTML (which really is tableless CSS
stuff and standard HTML), would most browsers be able to view the pages?
AOL, WebTV, IE3?

Thanks a ton.

~GK
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