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Posted by Andy Dingley on 02/05/06 22:15
On Sat, 04 Feb 2006 21:16:51 -0500, John Salerno
<johnjsal@NOSPAMgmail.com> wrote:
>What exactly does this mean:
>
>"Document sent as text/html are handled as tag soup [1] by most UAs.
>This means that authors are not checking for validity, and thus
>most XHTML documents on the web now are invalid.
This is a fallacious conclusion to draw from those initial conditions.
Empirically the evidence supports the same conclusion, but still not
that logic.
XHTML out there is bogus and badly formed. But that's nothing to do with
them being sent as text/html.
>Therefore the main
>advantage of using XHTML, that it has to be valid, is lost of the
>document is then sent as text/html."
This has never been an advantage of XHTML, at any incarnation beyond the
whiteboard stage. The web has _always_ taken a best-guess approach to
error recovery of any format, and XHTML never seriously attempted to
reverse that.
Maybe it should. Maybe it would have been better if all badly-formed XML
was rejected out of hand (as indeed it is in the applications world).
But XHTML crept onto the web gradually, as an evolution of HTML by the
designers, not as a move of real coders from the desktop onto the web.
It inherited HTML's sloppy approaches and we have to work from that as
out starting point - anything else is just pointless theorising.
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