Posted by Alan J. Flavell on 01/13/06 21:10

On Fri, 13 Jan 2006, Andy Dingley wrote:

> There's no need to support XHTML (as XML) in IE7. There's almost none
> of this out on the web in a valid form, and there's no need for it, as
> Appendix C will cover things perfectly well.

Yeah, well, most of the soi-disant "Appendix C" crud that I see out
there is just a poorly XHTML-ish-camouflaged version of
quasi-HTML-tag-soup. It would never fly as *real* XHTML, as Hixie
already predicted in his well-known advocacy page.

I'm afraid that instead of what the W3C XML experts originally touted
as the "clean break" with nasty old presentational quasi-HTML tag soup
which they said XML was going to give us, their (no doubt well-
intentioned) attempts to spell out a migration from HTML to XHTML have
resulted in nothing more than a new legacy of XHTML-flavoured tag
soup.

Their IMHO misguided demonstration of how to produce XHTML/1.0
"Transitional" was certainly part of that blunder (and just don't
start me on XHTML/1.0 "Frameset"). Did they really envisage that the
hordes would stampede from HTML/4 "Transitional" to XHTML/1.0
"Transitional", leaving "Strict" for the most part lying unwanted at
the side?? If I'm feeling generous towards them, I presume they did
it as a party trick, just to prove they could do, in XML, pretty much
anything that they'd done in HTML - without realising what the
implications would be.

Whatever XML is meant for, this surely wasn't it. Was it?

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