Posted by Sherman Pendley on 11/04/07 22:23

1001 Webs <1001webs@gmail.com> writes:

> The point I was trying to make (rather the question I was putting
> forward) was whether we should be embracing the new standards.

As far as browser support makes it practical to do so, yes.

But, I think it's important to understand that what the W3C issues
are not standards in the traditional sense - they're proposals that
may be ratified as standards at some future time.

Also, traditional internet standards are documents that describe
what applications have already implemented, so that new applications
will be able to communicate with them.

By contrast, W3C proposals are forward-looking, attempting to chart
a direction for future development. Browser makers don't necessarily
follow the chart closely, or in some cases at all.

> Bear in mind that CSS rules that apply to HTML, apply only to
> documents that are delivered as text/html, but not to XHTML.

That's incorrect. CSS works the same with either HTML or XHTML.

The problem with XHTML is that IE doesn't actually support it. IE
will display it if you deliver it as text/html, but if you do that,
IE parses it as HTML, ignoring the doctype declaration and relying
on its HTML parser's error-handling to sort out the non-HTML slashes,
namespace declarations, and such.

In theory, Microsoft is just another member of the W3C, whose vote
counts no heavier than any other member's. In practice, with 80% of
web surfers using IE, MS can veto any proposal by simply refusing to
implement it in IE, and that's what effectively happened to XHTML.

sherm--

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