Why XHTML 1.1? The whole specification is an exercise in futility and
deprives you of things that are useful on the Web of today and the near
future. And the browser that is by far the most common on the Web
chokes on XHTML 1.1 when served in the recommended way.
IE doesn't care about me so I don't care about IE. I'm not selling
anything or pushing a religion. I really don't care how many people
using older browsers can read what I have written so long as new user
agents can or at least can be adapted to easily.
Frankly. XHTML 1.0 should be served as application/xhtml+xml. That
MS hasn't pached IE for this or that it just doesn't ignore the http
mime type is beyond me even if their XHTML and XML are wrong.
Personally I think it's just a strategy to build up Gecko and Opera's
market share a bit to help refute monopoly claims. But that's neither
here nor there.
XHTML 1.0 and 1.1 for that matter are both good things. (And as a
side note you can still have frames in 1.1 if you write a DTD driver
for it like I did or just ignore the DTD and just use those tags
anyway.) They are important so that proprietary server side HTML (as
XML) can be efficiently be transformed into more or less traditional
HTML without too much CPU strain.
But the XHTML 2.0 spec and the direction they are going is part of my
posting. Why didn't they just start over with a new name and format
from scratch? HTML failed as a structural language early in it's
life. It IS a presentational language.
Pardon? You have dug yourself into a hole where only a small avantgarde
minority can access your pages, and now you are asking why you did
that?
No I'm asking why am I bothering with this XHTML hole when the XML
hole looks so much more cozy.
Oh. So you are now asking how to dig deeper. The avantgarde of the
avantgarde is already using user style sheets that may override
anything you say in your style sheet. So even they will find your pages
inaccesible.
No more like they would just choose to read the text source which if I
do my job correctly would be more plesent than reading HTML.
I'm must be missing the point somewhere.
Now that's something to agree on. There's some scent of trolling in the
air, but I think you are serious - and seriously misguided. It's so sad
to see how right I was in my article "Lurching Toward Babel: HTML, CSS,
and XML", Computer, July 1998 (!),
http://www.computer.org/computer/co1998/pdf/r7103.pdf
Actually you the type of person I was looking for a responce from as
your one of the supposed structural HTML people.
An interesting read and quite relevent but I don't come to your
conclusion. You missed the point of XML. XML is an ackknowledgement
of all the proprietary extentions that were going to and did happen to
HTML like it or not. And it's a beautiful thing as it's allows
standards and proprietary implimentations to co exist. It alows the
w3 to enforce it's semantics so that individual user agents like
Internet Explorer can't claim they are following the standard or show
a good reason why they have to not follow it. And guess what,
developement of IE and has gone down the drain since.
where I warned:
"The XML metalanguage can define the
formal syntax of a language, such as nesting
rules for elements. The semantics could
of course be described in plain English. But
this doesn’t seem to be of interest to XML
evangelists. They are more interested in
just specifying presentation with CSS.
Naturally, this means that they do not use
CSS as a presentation suggestion only,
since (with the XML/CSS model) there is
no default or user-defined presentation."
and
"As a publishing method, XML/CSS is
comparable to using text processing
software with styles or macros:"
That is, it means a huge leap - into the bad old times
before the ideas of platform, device and program independence.
To be quite frank you have it backward. I'm actually more interested
in structure and I'm saying that HTML 4.01 isn't structural enough.
I'm saying that I use p-class statements much as if I was designing my
own html tags. I use it as psuedo XML. So why not go there? The big
question: What is so darn great about HTML? To me the only reason to
use it is for presentation but I can use CSS for the most part for
that. And if I want even more structure I can use XML+XMLT+CSS if I'm
willing to embrace curreently bleeding edge browsers.
Custom Structural XML -> XSLT -> Presentational XML+CSS
What's so really bad that? When an adequate advanced structural format
comes along I can later embrace that.
Or for really basic pages to introduce my dog Togo why not just a
basic simple structural and presentational XML + CSS. We're talking
about a page less than 1K in size here.
P.S. Just to make it clear I don't really have a dog Togo.