HTML or XHTML: Does It Really Matter? | Hacker News Reader

HTML or XHTML: Does It Really Matter?

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10 pointsajbatac13 comments

Only use XHTML when you need to have your content parsed as XML. Otherwise, there is nothing wrong at all with well-formed HTML.

the opposite should be your strategy because XHTML is more easily machine read, and thus more easily repurposed (and therefore, a more powerful storage/interchange format). use XHTML so your content can be parsed as XML unless you have a specific and clear reason to abandon easy machine readability.

That also makes it easier for others to repackage/repurpose/mash.

Tools like BeautifulSoup (Python) and hpricot (Ruby) make processing HTML just as easy as processing XML.

"For an invalid XML document, browsers did not even make an attempt to parse the document as best they could, as they would with HTML—instead, they just displayed a validation error and stopped".

Yes that is the idea: Force developers to write valid code.

Why force them?

isnt all this chaos with interoperable, semi-compatible enough for you???

the alternative is that people become reliant, then, on the implementations guess as to what the person meant. in order to still call such a thing a standard, you'd also have to standardize the guesswork involved in correcting people's mistakes. this would lead to a very large and cumbersome "standard" that violates principals of minimalism and least power. that being said, you can bet your bottom dollar that programs like "tidy" are really useful sometimes =D

That would be an excellent idea if browsers actually stuck to standards and didn't have any bugs. Unfortunately that will never happen, so developers are forced to write invalid code.

Also XHTML doesn't allow tons of useful things.

How are these things connected? I don't know of any browser bugs where the workaround includes writing non-well formed code.

And what useful things does XHTML not allow (which HTML allow)?

In HTML, the noscript element may be used. In XHTML, it is forbidden.

document.write() and document.writeln() cannot be used in XHTML, they can in HTML.

In XHTML, the use of the innerHTML property requires that the string be a well-formed fragment of XML.

Also as far as I remember there are odd things with iframes etc.

Also the fact that HTML: <input type=checkbox checked>

becomes <input type="checkbox" checked="checked"/>

can add quite a bit of unnecessary bloat to a page.

"XHTML is still worth using, because it’s a transitional standard that moves us towards a pure-XML Web. XML is inherently better than SGML, because it’s simpler and stricter, and much easier to parse (once you’ve understood its rules)."

This is where I have a problem. In my experience, one can either have a format designed for computers or humans. XML is badly designed for both. Humans don't like it for its unnecessary strictness (unnecessary because SGML can be parsed in a decidable fashion) and computers don't like it because of all the extraneous characters. Where does that leave XML?

It leaves XML as a dead duck. Sure legacy things will use it, and corporations will probably still love it, but it's had its day thank god.

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