There are two meanings to XHTML: technical and marketing. The technical kind (XHTML served using the application/xhtml xml MIME type) is a formulation of HTML as an XML vocabulary. The marketing kind (XHTML served using the text/html MIME type) is processed just like HTML by browsers but the authors attempt to observe slightly different syntax rules in order to make it seem that they are doing something newer and shinier compared to HTML.
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That's an HTML5 page, is it?
Rendered thusly on FF3.5/Linux:
http://handelaar.org/epic_fucking_fail.png
Yeah, this is *much* better than XHTML. And from the people who only a couple of years ago refused to shut the hell up about feed formats for nearly half a decade? Hard to resist.
John: that looks like a Firefox bug that almost certainly has nothing to do with HTML5 and is probably related to Henri's use of @font-face to provide custom fonts. For some reason it seems that is not working for you (it works fine for me). Maybe rather than slinging blame at undeserving targets, you could file a bug report and help get the issue fixed.
jgraham - 6th July 2009 17:03 - #
That's quite amusing, but it's also false.
My version of that last sentence would be "...the authors attempt to observe slightly different syntax rules in order to make documents simpler to author, more consistent, and easier to parse."
It's easy to get caught up in completely misguided arguments of MIME types, error handling and XML and forget that documents need to be authored and parsed by humans, on their own and in teams. I thoroughly believe that HTML written with XML rules (as I think is most descriptive of how XHTML is used) is the best way to be authoring documents.
@John: That's completely unrelated to HTML 5, and is probably a CSS 3 TrueType issue. Slinging that kind of language around only tars your position and turns people off.
Brad Neuberg - 7th July 2009 03:52 - #
@John Handelaar: Which distro, which version of Freetype and how the browser was obtained (it doesn't have the icon that Mozilla Corporation's release builds have)? FWIW, I tested my font choices on Ubuntu before, and they worked. Also, the font issue is an HTML5 issue only if you use HTML5 as broad buzzword that covers @font-face and OpenType. :-)
@Drew McLellan If you are concerned with humans parsing XHTML in order to understand what the DOM will be like and if the document is served as text/html, the humans need to consider HTML parsing anyway or they get may get the wrong idea of what the DOM will be like.
(Making Validator.nu optionally warn about implied tags is a pending feature request that hasn't been forgotten. I've been focusing on putting the parser inside Gecko lately.)
@Henri: it's a mistake to assume that all HTML authors even know what the DOM is. Many do. Many don't and don't care.
What's important is simple, clear rules so that they can write documents well without too much thought.
jgraham and Henri: you simply don't get to both claim 'browser error' and whine about the link I posted *and* simultaneously blame Microsoft's inability to support a MIMEtype on XHTML authors.
As usual, the guy who can write the best wins, in this case by highlighting just how very childish this all is.
Remember Futurama where Hermes was judged "Technically correct -- the best kind of correct"? They were joking.