[thelist] XHTML overrated

[martin burns]

Erika wrote:
> 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.

Aye, but only if you're handbuilding static pages. If it's coming out of a backend system then the semantic stuff will be handled by the rendering engine merging the data with the output templates.

Anything which needs to know the data structure would surely be given some kind of backend access, with the data being transferred XML-formatted - WDDX or RDF kind of thing.

Cheers
Martin