[thelist] The future of XML

[Peter-Paul Koch]

>Being a hand-coder for nearly 9 years, I have adapted my own coding 
>standards when
>developing sites for our clients. I capitalize all of my HTML tags and 
>their attributes,
>but the variables are lowercase.
>
>First off, I want to say that I absolutely hate XML.

Why? I don't use it, but I don't hate it either. It's a tool for various 
tasks, but not for coding web pages.

>A friend of mine just told me that in the next year or so, that XML will 
>become the standard for web development

As many already commented, this is nonsense. Sure, you can make a site with 
XML pages and CSS/JS/XSL stuff to lay it out, but why should you? Especially 
as it will be visible only in NN6 and IE5+

>and that I will not be able to code the way that I have become accustomed 
>to.  If this is the case, then I do not forsee myself being a web developer 
>for much longer as I am not about to adapt the way I code to someone elses 
>standards...

I have the same feeling, but with one major modification: I do not wish to 
change the way I code *as long as my way works in the browsers*. If the 
browsers, say, stop recognizing <P> and only accept <p>, I'll change my 
coding practices, but not before.

W3C promotes XHTML as a bridge between XML and HTML, personally I don't 
believe in XHTML because the changes it advocates are not necessary. 
Browsers will always continue to support good old HTML. For my reasoning see 
http://www.alistapart.com/stories/xhtml/

Anyway, this is an old discussion that hasn't moved forward much since I 
wrote the article more than a year ago. XHTML (= XML) works fine, but there 
is no reason why you *must* use it, it's strictly a personal choice.

ppk

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