Polluting the web

Hixie and Aaron Swartz are debating Hixie’s infamous Sending XHTML as text/html Considered Harmful on a W3C mailing list. While I am just as guilty of sending XHTML as text/html as anyone else (I’ve been meaning to fix this for a while but just haven’t found time yet) I’ll stick in an argument that Hixie hasn’t used yet. Sending XHTML as text/html basically amounts to pollution of the web. As far as the XML user agents of the future are concerned (which are supposedly one of the main reasons we use XHTML) an invalid XHTML document is unparseable and thus unreadable. Anyone who has tried to keep an XHTML blog valid will know how difficult it is to keep it that way, and without a browser refusing to display the document (as happened with Mozilla and diveintomark the other day thanks to an XML content type and a missing end tag) it can be all to easy to contribute to the pollution. As it stands, a massive proportion of the supposedly XHTML web may as well be just so many random floating bytes.

Posted 24th November 2002 at 9:21 am

This is Polluting the web by Simon Willison, posted on 24th November 2002.

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The more difficult W3C makes it for people to use XHTML, the more it is likely that in the future we are not going to move to XHTML. Actually, people probably going to follow Microsoft, and maybe others on this issue. W3C acts like a naughty child, who doesn't know that nobody is going to stick with them, just because some people repeat the word standard over and over again. People have their own patience, and they don't like to be treated as an idiot by idiots. So overall I see a move towards propietary formats, thank part in W3C effort to make this simple technology more complicated and hard to use.
Serge - 29th January 2004 23:33 - #

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Polluting the web

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