Post Archive
› February 22, 2005
Another approach to XHTML
Together with a collection of other people, I've been one of those that have promoted using HTML4 and serving the text/html media type for web pages unless you have some direct benefit to gain from XHTML being XML. I've also argued that said benefit would be lost as soon as conforming to Appendix C and serving the document as text/html became a must.
One of the features of iew that has not been up in this discussion is the support for XML and client side XSLT. XHTML1 is close to HTML4 and if served as XML (application/xml) the transformation from XHTML1 to HTML4 should be trivial. If a benefit can be seen in using XHTML1 instead of HTML4 but there is a demand for iew support, this is a viable alternative approach. It persists the well formedness demand, and can easily replace embedded SVG or MathML (to give the most common examples) with embedded objects pointing to a non-embedded version of the SVG or MathML content.
Comments
1. February 23, 2005 04:27 AM
2. February 23, 2005 07:31 AM
Charl van Niekerk Posted…
I also don't really see the advantages. If you're going to use embedded objects anyway, what's the point of not writing your markup in HTML 4 in the first place? If you want to write XHTML so that you can validate it and know you had a smaller chance of making mistakes in your markup, just do that and convert it once to HTML 4 using XSLT and put that on the server for people to download if you're not using a CMS that can handle these things for you automatically server-side.
Anne Posted…
I believe IE is going to parse your DOCTYPE then. Not something I like. Also, you do not want to use XSLT on the client side, especially not for this.