Posted by Jukka K. Korpela on 05/28/07 07:23

Scripsit Knut Krueger:

> but isn`t the wc3 validation better in XHTML

No it isn't. And why would you validate against a syntax definition that you
should not use?

Contrary to popular superstition, XHTML DTDs as a whole aren't "stricter"
than HTML 4.01 DTDs. XHTML DTDs disallow end tag omission, and you may call
this "stricter". But since the metalanguage is weaker (XML vs. SGML), the
XHTML DTDs allow many constructs that are forbidden in HTML - both in HTML
4.01 and XHTML, though only HTML 4.01 can make the rule part of the DTD.
(You can write a modified HTML DTD that makes all end tags compulsory if you
like. Or I can do that for you.)

> means <p><b> test </p></b>
> is marked as wrong in XHTML but not in HTML4.01?

Did you actually test that? No, you didn't.

> And what charset is the best voe 4.01 strict?

What has that got to do with anything? The choice of charset does not depend
on the version of HTML but on other considerations. The somewhat sarcastic
but correct answer is: since you had to ask, it's windows-1252. (I'm sure
you had mentioned the human language used, if it's not a Western European
language like English, German, or Spanish.)

(Note to fellow nitpickers: windows-1252 _is_ better, since the odds are
that some day the author's software throws in a character like en dash or
curly quote, in windows-1252 encoding, so using iso-8859-1 would mean wrong
information, even though browsers almost universally take iso-8859-1 as
actually meaning windows-1252.)

--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

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