What IS XHTML?
by Sapphire (January 30, 2005)
You really need to know what idiots think, so I’m trying to do my part by spouting my mind. Yes, I’ve decided to learn XHTML, and yes, the first step is having some idea what it is.From what I’ve been reading this morning, since I started working on this new venture sans coffee, it looks like XHTML is just a very strict HTML that forces documents to comply if they want to show properly. It’s kind of like HTML is Windows and XHTML is the Mac OS. Things may look right in Windows even though there’s some very buggy stuff going on underneath. Consequently, things break down and you can’t figure out what happened. In the Mac OS, every line of a program needs to be correct, or the OS chucks overboard, opting to save itself and the well-behaving programs.
In the end, XHTML will not make much difference for some of us on our individual sites. But the plan is for it to clean up the web by forcing people to comply. I’m speculating here, but consider this: every line of bad HTML causes every machine reading it to stumble, even if only for a fraction of a second. Really bad HTML will completely hang up a browser. Think of all the bad HTML all around the world, and add up the stumbling time. How much bandwidth is being wasted on this stuff?
Posted in Development & Design
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