[thelist] XHTML overrated

Erika Meyer erika at seastorm.com
Mon Jul 24 09:59:58 CDT 2000


I wrote a mildly-worded "rebuttal" on whatever ALA digest came out 
right after this, subject: "reasons to try XHTML."

Since then, Champeon's simple argument of there being no reason _not_ 
to use XHTML on new sites (if you hand-code) was enough to convince 
me to use XHTML on my new sites.  seastorm.com is coded XHMTL 
transitional & I'm building a new XHTML site, also.

I like it personally, because XHTML transitional forces me to be even 
tighter with my code than HTML4 transitional.  But I can still build 
the same sort of pages I was already building.

I mean, honestly, most browsers support HTML3.2, perhaps better than 
HTML4.  So why bother to code HTML4?

As for XML as a client-side language, I don't know much since I don't 
use XML & the browsers don't support it well... but it would seem 
that it would be really nifty in many ways.  For example, if I had a 
long list of faculty members at the college for which I was building 
a page I could make my code perhaps more descriptive...

<member>
<office></office>
<phone></phone>
</member>

... than if I were marking it up as a generic list or in a generic table.


>  > http://www.alistapart.com/stories/xhtml/
>  >
>  > for my arguments why XHTML is not (yet) important.
>
>
>i'm curious of you folks who are coding to the XHTML spec,
>why?

erika at seastorm.com
http://www.seastorm.com




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