Hacker News Reader

Comment by cygx | Hacker News Reader

The error handling has already been mentioned. There also was that issue of what mime-type to send in your HTTP headers to get the page displayed correctly in various clients. While you could develop in XHTML, you needed to serve it as technically broken HTML to be compatible with older browsers that still had a significant market share.

View on HN

Sounds like the complains are targetted at faulty implementations, not the document standard.

Yes, that the standard wasn't designed with the people actually implementing browsers and as a result was unusable for content in the real world whatever advantages it had in the theoretical world where it was widely and correctly implemented was a major problem.

Hence the “ivory tower” comment upthread.

The expression "ivory tower" has an entirely different meaning. Just because the couple of dominant players chose to ignore a standard, particularly in a time and age where they were outright hostile to interoperability initiatives, it doesn't mean the standard was not reasonable.

What good is a standard you can't use in practice? There also were other issues: XHTML was chasing the dream of the semantic, well-formed, machine-readable web, but it didn't do enough to help with pragmatic problems web designers trying to deliver a product actually faced. As much as I like the idea myself from a theoretical perspective, the market had other priorities.

I don't think the idea works from a theoretical perspective.

The browser is a communication channel between a publisher and a reader. They may want different things...

But the "semantic, well-formed, machine-readable web" idea is, in theory, a demand that the channel imposes on both parties. It's not something the publisher wants. It's not something the reader wants. Nobody cares what the channel wants; demanding extra information that isn't relevant to what any party to an actual transaction is trying to accomplish is always going to be doomed.

Readers care about positional information at a fairly minor level. Publishers care about it a lot. And hey, positional information has robust, if annoying, implementations.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com