XHTML - myths and reality. Useful overview of XHTML from Tina Holmboe of the W3C’s XHTML Working Group, which suggests considering HTML 4.01 strict unless you need mixed namespaces for things like MathML. I’ve been storing this blog’s content as XHTML but serving as HTML for several years now.
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Meh. This seems like one person's diatribe to me. It is well thought out and well researched, but IMO some of the assumptions are false. In particular, the author assumes that your reason for serving XHTML is to take advantage of client-side XML validation and mixed namespaces. But I would argue that the simplified syntax and parser support for XHTML/XML is a good enough reason to make the switch. You aren't really losing anything by serving up XHTML as text/html vs. serving up HTML 4.01. And, as the author points out, doing so is standards compliant.
Also, the stuff about HTML/SGML being superior because you can use DTDs to specify how elements can be nested is wrong. You can use DTDs to specify element nesting in XHTML/XML too, and a validating parser will tell you if you violate the DTD. Moreover, as the author pointed out, superior (more easily maintained, comprehensible, and less verbose) mechanisms are available for defining XML document types, like XML schemas.
Mike Malone - 7th October 2008 19:00 - #
Mike, there's no "simplified syntax and parser support" when you serve XHTML as text/html. The point about DTDs is that XML DTDs do not support ancestor-descendant exclusions--only parent-child relationships.
Interesting how the article uses the wrong name for the XHTML2 WG throughout.
P.S. This comment form in the XHTML mode says "'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u2019' in position 21: ordinal not in range(128)" when attempting to use proper punctuation.