Comments on: Slashdot’s Validity

By: Johan De Silva

Johan De Silva — Fri, 14 Oct 2005 09:23:29 +0000

It”s a difficult balance and one should know where to draw the line. My mum looking up recopies on the web is unlikely to view source or run it through a valuator. We should go for standards to progress our careers however the web to me is about the average Joe who can put up a website and the browsers should try and render it now and in the future.

By: Albium

Albium — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 21:43:38 +0000

I applaud their choice to use real HTML from the get-go rather than building an XHTML document and then sending it as text/html—a very pointless and borderline harmful practice, in my opinion.

Don’t screw with MIME types; if your page is being completely mislabeled at the server level, then how can you applaud yourself for something as petty as validation?

Of course, XHTML is awesome if you’re doing it properly. ;) But ten points to them for using the right DOCTYPE, and a Strict one at that!

By: Nick Fitzsimons

Nick Fitzsimons — Thu, 29 Sep 2005 12:42:37 +0000

@Liam Egan: It's not true that XSLT can only output XHTML; XSLT can output XML (including XHTML), HTML or plain text. And, thanks to the justly reviled disable-output-escaping attribute, it can even spit out stuff that is "almost, but not quite well-formed XML".

By: Chris Hester

Chris Hester — Wed, 28 Sep 2005 08:50:19 +0000

Any XML-based format such as pure XHTML, XSL or RSS needs to be well-formed. As for XHTML served as xhtml/xml, we all know this is effectively dead due to IE6′s refusal to accept it. Sadly, IE7 won’t either, according to Microsoft.

By: Liam Egan

Liam Egan — Wed, 28 Sep 2005 05:50:29 +0000

I”ve written XSLT (which is itself so tortuous and ugly that it almost by definition cannot be called well-formed) to transform both HTML and XHTML

Just a little thing here. XSLT can only be well formed, otherwise it simply doesn’t work. In the context of what you’re talking about; XSLT doesn’t need to be well-formed because, well, it’s not a markup language.

Besides that, it’s used to transform XML from one design to another (XML design that is). so unless it’s XHTML, again, it won’t work :)

By: Laurens Holst

Laurens Holst — Tue, 27 Sep 2005 18:50:21 +0000

Huzzah!

And XHTML is a nice toy.

By: Aristotle Pagaltzis

Aristotle Pagaltzis — Mon, 26 Sep 2005 21:20:22 +0000

Yeah, as Anne said, the MIME type is important, because if it’s text/html, then your markup is HTML, regardless of what it looks like when you view source. The major advantage of XHTML is that you can embed other XML vocabularies such as SVG or MathML – that’s not possible with HTML. If you’re not doing that and don’t intend to make use of it at some point, then you’re better off using HTML, for the most part.

By: Brad Bice

Brad Bice — Mon, 26 Sep 2005 20:40:04 +0000

A little off topic (but not much), but is XSLT the future of styling? Or will CSS be around for a long time?

By: Olivier

Olivier — Mon, 26 Sep 2005 14:37:51 +0000

Does a site validate if it uses italics for more than 90% of the text displayed? I believe it shouldn’t.

By: Chris

Chris — Mon, 26 Sep 2005 12:56:08 +0000

Eric: totally agree with you. I don’t see what all the fuss about XHTML is for. HTML does its job quite well. A few years ago a lot of people jumped on the XHTML bandwagon, and I think many didn’t really know why they were doing it; they just did it because everyone else was.

By: ppk

ppk — Mon, 26 Sep 2005 12:33:31 +0000

XHTML vs. HTML:

I have one argument in favour of using XHTML instead of HTML; and it’s the reason that I’m currently porting QuirksMode.org to XHTML, and not to HTML.

The argument is that in the future I might be tempted to start importing my pages into a single page interface using liberal doses of xmlhttp and all that stuff. In that case XHTML pages, which are (supposed to be) valid XML, are far easier to parse than HTML pages. It’ll make my future job easier.

Other than this (admittedly as yet theoretical) reason I agree that there’s little reason to prefer XHTML over HTML.

By: Anne van Kesteren

Anne van Kesteren — Mon, 26 Sep 2005 07:40:30 +0000

Also, the media type (MIME) thing is important. text/html means your document will be handled by the tag soup parser and the result will be a HTML DOM, always. */*+xml or application/xml means your document will be treated as XML. It will means that attributes like xml:lang have different meaning (namespaces are recognized) it will mean that node names are returned in the way you wrote them in your markup and a lot of other things. It also means that you are using XHTML.

By: Anne van Kesteren

Anne van Kesteren — Mon, 26 Sep 2005 07:30:58 +0000

To nitpick, HTML can not be well-formed or ill-formed. For HTML you can only be valid or invalid. (Which makes sense, as you need to go through a tag soup parser which expects a specific formatted document.)

By: » Eric On Slashdot’s Validity : Pig Work : Weblog of Freelance Designer Steven Clark aka Norty Pig, Hobart, Tasmania

Mon, 26 Sep 2005 05:05:04 +0000

[...] 2; 4:06 pm “Eric Meyer just posted… Slashdot’s Validity which I rather liked” As we all know that old s [...]

By: jandjplush

jandjplush — Mon, 26 Sep 2005 03:39:59 +0000

Slashdot, as a site that accepts ads, is going to get horrible markup shoved into its pages. That”s just the way it is.

iframes or object elements