[thelist] XHTML overrated (was: CSS, Netscape, .class oddity?)

[martin burns]

Aardvark wrote:
 
>what about the millions of
> web pages that aren't going to make that switch in a timely
> fashion?  what about the fact that all those WYSIWYG and
> CMS-driven sites won't make the switch immediately because
> their tools won't handle it?  

Pretty much all 3rd party CMS are XML based, so can output to anything you like - HTML2.0, WMRL, HTML for PDA, Acrobat, PostScript etc. It all depends on the rendering and output templates.

>does DreamWeaver code XHTML?

Probably, if you set it up right. It's pretty extensible, so you could presumably get it to do so by default. I'd expect the new UltraDev version to do so as standard (JohnD?).

> 
> no, i've thought about making pages forward-compatible, but
> i honestly think it's so far off that most of my current
> sites don't need it, and as such, why not just stick to the
> HTML4 specs?  at least that way i can still enforce the
> house style on codes, and know quite well how the browsers
> will handle it...
> 
> i like the concept, but its practicality right now is
> minimal...
> 
> i'm curious of you folks who are coding to the XHTML spec,
> why?

If I were coding new pages, or doing an upgrade anyway, they would all be xHTML spec, but I wouldn't go to the trouble of a rewrite from HTML4 just for this reason. If browsers are going to go native XML (something I'm not sure about anyway), then why do 2 major reworkings?

<rant>
Why do people get all worked up about the benefits of XML as a browser language? The chief benefit of XML is server-side with a rendering engine to put out whatever the client uses best, even that bastardisation of HTML which NN4 uses
</rant>