[wp-hackers] WordPress, web standards, and (X)HTML

[Joey B]

On 11/30/06, Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis <bhawkeslewis at googlemail.com> wrote:
> <snip>
> Most user agents hand such XHTML over to the same tag soup parsers that
> parse any other HTML. These parsers are only capable of rendering XHTML
> 1.0 acceptably because of their historical failure to conform to the
> HTML 4.01 specification in the first place. Worse, certain JavaScript
> and CSS techniques that work with documents served as text/html will not
> work when the same documents are served as application/xhtml+xml. For
> this and other reasons, many consider serving XHTML 1.0 as text/html at
> all to be bad practice.
> </snip>
>
> <snip>
> If this forces WordPress to double-check markup for well-formedness,
> validity, and conformance, so much the better. People put a lot of
> effort into writing their blogs. They deserve markup that user agents
> can read correctly if they follow the specifications; markup that will
> still be parsable in a hundred years time when Internet Explorer and
> Firefox will be long forgotten.
> </snip>

But Internet Explorer won't be forgotten in the next five years, and
unfortunately for us, probably not the next 10. Any project looking at
the long term shouldn't be thinking "100 years," but a more realistic
number, say, "10." ... With that said, we have to cater to the
browser. If we want to use XHTML and advocate its use over HTML, what
are we to do when IE destroys a page using it? Many standards lovers
(myself included) consider using text/html perfectly acceptable. It's
no different than CSS hacks. I don't wanna argue much here (it's late
and I'm tired :D ) but I wanted to put my 2 cents in.

-- 
Joey Brooks
Milk Carton Designs || milkcartondesigns.com