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Posted by Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn on 11/20/07 18:14
The Magpie wrote:
> Andy Dingley wrote:
>> On 19 Nov, 18:38, The Magpie <use...@pigsinspace.co.uk> wrote:
>>> Personally, I prefer XHTML 1.0 over HTML 4.x because it is much easier
>>> to ensure it is error-free. But that's a personal choice.
>> What makes you think that?
>
> I should have thought that was obvious.
>
> HTML was designed from the start as a subset of SGML that would permit
> lax coding of tags
True, if "lax coding" means not to code unnecessary parts. The end tags of
elements being optional and not providing a value for boolean attributes
probably had a good purpose in the days where bandwidth was precious. It
only turned out that few people understood how to make use of that feature
properly, and I would assume that with increasing bandwidth it became more
important that the code could be parsed faster. Whereas I still don't agree
with XML's necessity for redundancy caused by disabled="disabled" and the like.
> and allow addition of non-specified tags
Wrong. Extensions of the language, which is what you are talking about,
were allowed not before XHTML 1.0.
> such as the many that Microsoft chose to add to their own implementation
> back to HTML 3.x and earlier.
That was and is Microsoft's fault, not HTML's or TBL's.
> XHTML is - of course - simply XML.
XHTML is actually *an application of* XML which is a subset of SGML.
However, there are few validating XML parsers out there, and AFAIK none in
an XHTML user agent, so ensuring correct XHTML markup is not as easy as you
may think. A non-validating XML parser must only choke on not well-formed
markup. That is far from guaranteeing Valid markup, though.
F'up2 comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html
PointedEars
--
Anyone who slaps a 'this page is best viewed with Browser X' label on
a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web,
when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another
computer, another word processor, or another network. -- Tim Berners-Lee
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