Simon Willison’s Weblog

Subscribe
Atom feed for xhtml

25 items tagged “xhtml”

2012

What is the difference between XHTML 1.0 strict and transitional?

Not a lot. XHTML transitional lets you use a few presentational attributes and elements that aren’t available in XHTML strict. Here’s a more detailed overview from back in 2005: http://24ways.org/2005/transitio...

[... 59 words]

2009

Every time you attempt to parse HTML with regular expressions, the unholy child weeps the blood of virgins, and Russian hackers pwn your webapp. Parsing HTML with regex summons tainted souls into the realm of the living. HTML and regex go together like love, marriage, and ritual infanticide.

Andrew Clover

# 16th November 2009, 10:32 am / funny, html, parsing, regex, regular-expressions, stackoverflow, xhtml, andrew-clover

Django ponies: Proposals for Django 1.2

I’ve decided to step up my involvement in Django development in the run-up to Django 1.2, so I’m currently going through several years worth of accumulated pony requests figuring out which ones are worth advocating for. I’m also ensuring I have the code to back them up—my innocent AutoEscaping proposal a few years ago resulted in an enormous amount of work by Malcolm and I don’t think he’d appreciate a repeat performance.

[... 1,674 words]

Microsoft was slowing development of new versions of Internet Explorer in the hope that Web-based applications would not be able to compete with Windows applications, and Windows applications would keep people locked in to the Windows operating system. Thus XHTML2 was developed with no expectation that the leading Web browser would ever implement it.

David Baron

# 8th July 2009, 8:30 pm / david-baron, xhtml, xhtml2, microsoft, ie, web-standards

Insofar as it encouraged workaday web professionals to recognize that there are such things as best practices independent of particular browser implementations, I think XHTML can be termed successful. Insofar as it got people thinking about the possibility of a better Web ahead of us, I think XHTML can be termed successful. Insofar as it changed the popular conception of professional web design and thrust standards into the forefront, I think XHTML can be termed successful.

James Bennett

# 8th July 2009, 7:36 pm / james-bennett, xhtml, web-standards

In defense of web developers. Zeldman: “The social benefit of rethinking markup sealed the deal. XHTML’s introduction in 2000, and its emphasis on rules of construction, gave web standards evangelists like me a platform on which to hook a program of semantic markup replacing the bloated and unsustainable tag soup of the day.”

# 7th July 2009, 3:52 pm / html5, jeffrey-zeldman, markup, web-standards, xhtml

Turns out, a lot of people are saddened by the loss of a spec they don’t understand, and if they did, would not bother using.

Assaf Arkin

# 6th July 2009, 9:02 pm / web-standards, assaf-arkin, html5, xhtml, xhtml2

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.

Henri Sivonen

# 6th July 2009, 12:46 pm / henrisivonen, xhtml, buzzwords

Yes, it'd be nice if everyone kept up to date on the progress of the various W3C working groups. They don't. There are a lot of people who asked what professional markup looked like and were told (right or wrong) that XHTML was the future. So they went ahead and learned XHTML, built their websites and chose watching a DVD or spending time with their kids over watching Mark Pilgrim and Sam Ruby do battle over Postel's Law. Now all of a sudden they're told XHTML is dead. Some wailing and gnashing of teeth is to be expected. What's needed is less "boy aren't I smarter than them" snideness, and more Hey, here's what's up.

Alan Storm

# 4th July 2009, 12:51 pm / xhtml, html5, mark-pilgrim, sam-ruby, postelslaw, xhtml2, web-standards, w3c, alan-storm

FAQs about the future of XHTML. The XHTML 2 Working Group charter will not be renewed after 2009—as far as the W3C are concerned, XHTML5 is the future of XHTML.

# 3rd July 2009, 1:37 am / w3c, web-standards, xhtml, xhtml2, xhtml5

2008

Using SVG on the Web. I’ve been having a lot of fun playing with SVG recently. Here are some useful tips for including SVG images in HTML and XHTML documents.

# 23rd December 2008, 1 pm / benjamin-smedberg, html, svg, xhtml

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.

# 7th October 2008, 4:56 pm / html, mathml, namespaces, tinaholmboe, w3c, xhtml

django-html. A small project I’m working on to make Django behave better with regards to HTML v.s. XHTML.

# 9th September 2008, 11:59 pm / django, djangohtml, html, projects, python, xhtml

James Bennett: Why HTML. Finally, somewhere to point people when they ask why I avoid XHTML that’s a bit more up to date than Hixie’s rant from 2002.

# 18th June 2008, 12:27 pm / hixie, html, ian-hickson, james-bennett, web-standards, xhtml

Elliotte Rusty Harold: Why XHTML. “XHTML makes life harder for document authors in exchange for making life easier for document consumers.”—since there are a lot more document authors than there are tools for consuming, this seems like an argument AGAINST XHTML to me.

# 5th June 2008, 9:25 pm / elliotte-rusty-harold, html, html5, web-standards, xhtml

2007

SVG and text/html. Anne van Kesteren discusses the need for SVG and MathML to be embeddable in HTML 5, not just XHTML.

# 17th October 2007, 4:06 pm / annevankesteren, html, html5, mathml, svg, xhtml

Problems with XHTML content type.

The first question you should be asking is why you need XHTML—if you don’t have a specific reason (the need for XML parsers to be able to consume your pages) you’re much better off with HTML 4.01 for now, and HTML 5 in probably a year or so.

[... 245 words]

W3C Relaunches HTML Activity (via) “XHTML has proved valuable in other markets” == XHTML on the public Web has failed. Long live HTML!

# 7th March 2007, 10:34 pm / html, w3c, xhtml

2006

XHTML is not going to replace HTML as the web's official markup language because it turns out that resilience is more useful than brittleness.

Douglas Crockford

# 14th December 2006, 5:40 pm / douglas-crockford, xhtml

Why Tim Berners-Lee is Wrong. Elliotte thinks XHTML is not the problem. I’m not convinced.

# 30th October 2006, 5:54 pm / elliotte-rusty-harold, tim-berners-lee, xhtml

2004

xhtmloutlines—Technorati Developers Site (via) OPML alternative built on top of XHTML.

# 24th March 2004, 6:54 am / microformats, opml, technorati, xhtml

2003

PyMeld

PyMeld is a concrete implementation of something I’ve been thinking about for months: A template system that takes an XHTML page as a template and manipulates it based on cloning and modifying elements within the template identified using their ID attribute. It’s a very elegant solution that makes good use of Python’s object overloading support to make manipulating templates as intuitive as possible. Maybe the same thing will be possible in PHP once the new overloading functions become part of the standard package.

[... 180 words]

XHTML is just fine

In Who dropped the deat cat into the well? (via Mark Pilgrim), Brian Donovan argues that keeping web site content in (X)HTML is a fundamentally bad idea. I thoroughly disagree. When I started this weblog, I realised I needed a format for storing my entries that would keep my content “free” to be reused in multiple different ways. I thought about a simple UBB style markup language, with [url="http://www.example.com/"]links like this[/url], automatic line breaks and a few other simple structures such as lists and headings. I also considered Wiki markup of some sort, again looking for a reasonable expressive but controlled markup vocabulary for storing my blog entries in a reusable way.

[... 430 words]

2002

Hixie on XHTML

Ian Hickson: Sending XHTML as text/html Considered Harmful. Ian makes an excellent case for sticking with HTML 4.01 rather than upgrading to XHTML. Here’s the killer point (at least for me):

[... 193 words]