[thelist] The future of XML

aardvark roselli at earthlink.net
Tue Oct 16 11:05:59 CDT 2001


> From: Jay Fitzgerald <jayfitz at bayou.com>
>
> 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.

i also have my own coding standards, that fit within the HTML 
specifications, of course... after years of doing it, i've become 
pretty specific about my style, although it has changed a lot as my 
skills have evolved...

> First off, I want to say that I absolutely hate XML. A friend of mine

why do you hate XML?  because you don't know it yet?  because 
you might have to learn it?  or do you just find the language 
inadequate or deficient in some way?

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

well, XHTML is a reformulation of HTML in XML, so insofar as 
browsers support it, you can switch over... but my guess is that 
browsers will continue to support HTML for years to come, not 
counting all the older browsers that will stay out there...

> 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...

no offense, but that's a pretty poor attitude...

you don't want to learn?  you don't want to expand your skills?  did 
you forget that HTML is also someone else's standards?

when i hire people here, i have them adapt to the house style... 
code consistency is important, it allows any developer here to 
share code with anyone else and know exactly how it will be laid 
out... little things like caps vs. no caps or tabs vs. spaces can 
actually affect how efficiently people can read another's code...

so, if you didn't code to the W3C standards for HTML, and you 
refused to adapt to the company style for code, you'd never get a 
job here, or at many other places... again, this isn't an assault, so i 
hope you take this as advice...

i'd consider getting familiar with XHTML, and once you learn how to 
use your HTML skills to create valid XHTML, you're already partway 
into understanding how XML works syntactically...





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