HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
XHTML sounds great!
Why isn't everyone
using it?
The error handling is
too draconian—half
the web would be nothing
but error messages if we
switched tomorrow.
But wouldn't that enforce
higher standards?
It surely can't be that bad.
OK, let me show you an example,
Here are two identical pages,
except one is XHTML and one is HTML.
You must have made
a major mistake
to get such a horrible
error message!
In both documents,
I used a reserved character,
the ampersand,
without the correct
escape sequence.
Only one character is wrong?
Well, that result does seem
a little excessive, but now
you know you've made
a mistake and can correct it.
You might want to display
user content, or pull in content
from another website; that has
to be valid too. And even if you get
things right, IE doesn't support XHTML
correctly before version 9.
I might have known IE would
come into it somewhere...
The drive toward
XML
meant that
HTML
was largely sidelined. The
focus was on building compound documents out of various
XML
dia-
lects. This included the
HTML
-like
XHTML
and the previously men-
tioned
SVG
,
M
ath
ML
, but also
XF
orms,
RDF
(Resource Description
Framework), and any number of other proposals. It was envisaged that
you might write web applications without using any
XHTML
at all.
