Re: Would you take a complimentary course on HTML from a company whose website looked like this?

Originally the W3C was not behind HTML 5 and they were backing end
developing XHTML. Now the W3C is behind HTML 5, but the specs aren't
even final yet. We have a long time before that becomes a standard and
I mean years. For major browsers as far as I know Safari and Google
Chrome are the only ones that support HTML 5. I know IE 9 is going to
support HTML 5 and I'm sure FireFox is working on support.

There is tooling and frameworks that require XHTML. JavaServer Faces
with facelets support requires XHTML for example. The W3C still has a
division working on XHTML. So it's not dead and probably won't be any
time so. It should, however, always validate. After all, under the
covers HTML really is XML it just has defined tags.

Just to add a bit more about HTML 5. So far no one is really agreeing
on the standards. Google thinks it should be one way FireFox thinks it
shouldn't, for example. As I'm sure you're aware getting developers
to agree on what the specs should say/do isn't easy :-)

--
James R. Perkins



On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 11:57, Vern Hamberg <vhamberg@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

You don't need to do XHTML to write Web 2.0 apps, I'm thinking. Not
everyone buys into this roadmap.

Putting on my gloves!

As I was just told by our green-haired kid, validating to XHTML is a
nice thought but not always useful. IE doesn't support it, anyhow - it
converts it to HTML validation under the covers, so what's the point?
Putting that little icon on your page? Eventually it won't validate as
the standards proceed onward and browser support changes again.

Do you put in that extra time to validate everything, or do you have
something that really works? And the validation will fail in a short
time, anyhow!

And there is no lockstep roadmap as described here. Yes, should we
strive toward the best practices? Of course!

His opinion - which I respect - is that as HTML5 comes into full
support, XHTML will drop by the wayside. Again, browser support hurts it
- IE just doesn't work as we'd like it to - namely, as the rest of the
world does - wait, IS there a "rest of the world"?  :-)

Vern