Re: NT: XHTML? (was: Release of a new set of XML/XSLT libraries)

[Julian Missig <julian jabber org>]

On 06 May 2001 02:04:57 +0900, Yamagata Hiroo wrote:
> At 09:25 01/05/05 -0600, you wrote:
> 
> >Are there any arguments in favor of HTML over XHTML or vice versa,
> >since the output is essentially the same?
> 
> HTML.
> 
> Netscape 3 and IE 3 (or 4) can't handle xhtml .  For the sake of downward 
> compatibility,
> HTML is better.
> 

What?? The entire purpose of XHTML is to be backwards compatible. I've
been making my web sites XHTML for almost a year now, and I have no
problems with older browsers. See the appendix of the XHTML
specification for tips on getting it to work fine with older browsers.

> As long as you are using newer browsers, there won't be any difference. So 
> moving to xhtml does not bring in any additional advantages.  Also, xhtml 
> is VERY strict, and it is VERY difficult to make it perfectly xhtml 
> compliant.  The HTML that the current system is spitting out
> (the one used for GNOME Users Guide) is very untidy, and it would take 
> oodles of work to get it right.  So we'd be bringing in more chances of 
> errors for no extra advantage.
> 

But *because* it's very strict it's much easier to parse...

> Unless we plan to rely heavily on xhtml stylesheets in the future, I'd opt 
> for HTML.
>

But that means we'll have to rely on HTML parsers in the future. With
XHTML, we only have to rely on XML parsers, with the addition of a
stylesheet (and I'm fairly certain the stylesheets for XHTML will get
better as time goes on)

Julian
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