evan_tech -- xhtml

11:25 pm, 25 Aug 05

xhtml

Why are people so into xhtml? And, the followup, why are they all militant/proud about it? Where's the producer/consumer (user) benefit? We can all imagine a world where everything is machine-parsable, but it is the same dream as Lojban or Esperanto.

I had a conversation with an intern who had observed that Google, a famous web company, has "awful" HTML on its pages. (Though there are exceptions.) Bandwidth concerns (follow the previous link) aside, I wonder, where's the actual benefit. He explained, "because how else can you use the power of CSS", but that seems to be a chicken-and-egg spiral of uselessness.

lithiana	i don't think XHTML, on its own, is particularly useful. what is (or may be useful) in future is being able to import arbitrary XML namespaces into your HTML. whether browsers support that, of course, is an entirely different matter..
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warrend	I have always thought the complaints about google's "awful" html were sort of silly. From a business perspective, if +[increased browser complaince testing cost] -[bandwidth savings] still yields a profit, then that sounds like a smart move. Also, name a browser that google.com renders strangely in. I think the reason people gravitate towards xhtml more aggresively than xml is that
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warrend

[mouse misfire...]

, like xml, xhtml seems to force a much greater level of standards compliance in the data. This makes them useful for machine-parsability and all, but I think there is another motive behind the push for it. Why would most sites need parsable html? They don't, but a lot of people believe that pushing for stricter standards complaince will force some browsers (ahem, IE) closer towards a rendering model that is much more strict.

It is a good idea in practice, as if those goals are reached then development and testing time goes way down.

The problem is, as you mentioned, that customers really just do not care about any of this. Even though I am a standards nut and care way too much about "doing things right", I always get turned off by people who put too much stock in the tech end of the details. What is the point of being able to brag to your tech friends about your bleeding edge platform or code, when it doesn't benefit (and sometimes makes things worse) for your customers?

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mart

I really just use XHTML because it helps me not to have to deal with all of HTML's wacky minimisation/optional stuff. I know that when I see /> I have an empty element, for example. It's also nice to think that (in theory at least) I could parse my own stuff with a simple, readily-available XML parser if I wanted to transform it in some way.

I guess I'm not the kind of person you're thinking of, though. I'm certainly not militant or proud, and have often just used HTML because it was better in a given situation, such as with LiveJournal layouts where 90%of users won't be writing syntactically-correct HTML, let alone XHTML. In those cases, they usually end up declared as HTML 4.01 Transitional as a sort of “well, I tried…” gesture to those who are fanatical about validation.

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drbrain

zenspider always bugs be about me leaving off all the optional close tags for HTML 4. He claims that someday I'll have to switch to XHTML and I'll have to add all those close tags back. I don't see it happening any time soon (probably not even in the next decade), since no large sites are serving XHTML correctly (DOCTYPE, MIME type and all).

I get the full power of CSS and the full power of bandwidth savings without getting tangled up in DOCTYPEs and MIME types and broken browsers and whatever else has happened since I decided XHTML was dumb.

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christowang

As someone who creates sites for Joe Idiot, XHTML + CSS usually makes a life a little easier for me when they come back and say "I want it in purple instead of green" or "I want all of the bold text blue now so it stands out more."

This being said you could just use HTML + CSS and get the same benefits, I've just found ever since I've tried to stick with having everything validate with XHTML, my pages seen neater and easier to follow for myself.

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ydna Good question. I like xhtml, but now I'll have to think about why I prefer it over other web markup styles.

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banana

A fairly well known example: this is nonsensical but valid XHTML:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html>
  <head>
    <title>My Page</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <p>
      Blah
      <a href='http://www.example.com/'>
        <span>
          <-- OMG - nested anchors! -->
          <a href='http://www.google.com/'>blah</a>
        </span>
      </a>
      blah...
    </p>
  </body>
</html>

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bostonsteamer

I want to second what Danny and the above commenter said.

I'm not militant/proud about using xhtml in and of itself. I am militant/proud of using it as a means towards the goal of separation of data and presentation.

I don't care about closing <br/> tags and quoting attribute values, and I'm only moderately irked by the use of tables for purposes other than the display of tabular data.

For me, it's all about realpolitik: if I need to alter the presentation of 20 pages, and only 19 of them change when I make a change to the css file, and I have to waste my time digging through the template itself to find that someone put a style attribute in a div to override its default behavior, that's what makes me want to punch people with a fist that has an "x H T M L" tattoo on it.

When you're building a dynamic data-driven site, and/or a site with many people's thumbs in its pie, it just makes things easier to build, maintain, and redesign.

Nice tag, btw.

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bostonsteamer Er, when I started typing, christowang was "the above commenter".

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bostonsteamer that shady "someone put a style attribute in a div" character is frequently myself, btw.

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pinterface

My guess at the primary reasons:

It's shiny, new, and fashionable.
It's, like, XML, dude! And we all know XML is awesome because the advertising tells us so.

XHTML 1.0 has no realized benefit over HTML 4, though there is the theoretical benefit lithiana mentioned and caveated. XHTML 2.0, on the other hand, makes the strides XHTML 1.0 probably should have made, but I'd be anticipating <h> and <section> tags even were it full SGML or LISP-style s-expressions.

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ydna	Good question. I like xhtml, but now I'll have to think about why I prefer it over other web markup styles.
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bostonsteamer	Er, when I started typing, christowang was "the above commenter".
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bostonsteamer	that shady "someone put a style attribute in a div" character is frequently myself, btw.
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