Posted on January 24, 2009 - by Khaled
XHTML Users: Grow up!
During the last years Web standards started to gain an increasing popularity among Web designers. Still Web standards addicts are a ceaselessly growing minority until now. This is probably due to the fact that the majority regards the use of web standards in their projects as a hard process that requires a lot of time and process. Which is not 100% true in my opinion as Web Standards are the only right way to go! Dedication to standards is the key! following the W3C recommendations is a must! This is the first post from the “WEB STANDARDS ARE THE ONLY WAY!” series. And what a better start than having a “pragmatic evangelist for web standards and accessibility” sharing his view about subjects like the future of HTML, the use of XHTML or Should we start using HTML5?
So here’s a short, yet very interesting, interview with Tommy Olsson. But first let’s introduce Tommy to those who don’t know him. Tommy is a Swedish Web standards and accessibility Guru. He’s the Design Team leader at the SitePoint forums (so he’s my boss there!). He has written many articles for SitePoint and especially he co-authored with Paul O’Brien the SitePoint CSS reference. He had also won the “HTML/XHTML Guru” award of the SPF community for several consecutive years. You can check out his blog here.
The Future of HTML and HTML5
1. Almost 20 years after the first relase of HTML how do you see its future?
I’ll confidently state that HTML will have its place in web development for the foreseeable future … provided you don’t ask me how long that is.
There is a need for a semantic markup language to exchange information between people. Although there are fashionable trends with ‘rich content’ (which invariably means ‘flashy’ and ‘pretty’ rather than ‘useful’), all such technologies have drawbacks when it comes to accessibility. HTML as such is inherently accessible.
2.What are your thoughts about HTML5? should we start using the released drafts especially with the available validators? What does it add? is it heading towards more respect of semantics? What potential does HTML5 has?
HTML5 worries me. A lot. I’ve been using HTML since 1993 (before it even had a version number), so I’ve seen the changes it has gone through. In the mid-’90s there was a loss of focus on semantics, in favour of presentation, but it quickly became apparent that this was the wrong way to go. Content and presentation should be kept separate, which is why CSS was invented.
The ongoing work with HTML5 seems to ignore semantics to a large degree. Yes, it proposes to add a handful of semantic element types, but it also adds purely presentational stuff that – in my opinion – doesn’t belong in a markup language.
Even worse is that it redefines long-established semantics of existing element types. For instance, the P element type no longer denotes a paragraph; it becomes a generic block-level container – nothing more than a synonym for DIV.
The contempt for accessibility is even more worrying. The drafts propose to eliminate several important attributes (or at least make them non-required). The reason appears to be a lack of support in contemporary assistive technology.
My opinion is that HTML5 is to semantics and accessibility what Herod was to the Bethlehem Playground Association!
Should we use it? For experimental purposes, perhaps, but I would strongly recommend against any attempt to use it on a serious, professional web site. Why? Because it’s not a W3C recommendation. It’s just an early draft which is likely to change many times before consensus is reached. (If that ever happens.)
XHTML? Again?
3. What are your thoughts about combining HTML5 and XHTML2?
XHTML2 is not backwards compatible with HTML at all. That’s also true for parts of HTML5, but not to the same degree. (If I’ve understood the drafts correctly.)
XHTML2 did show some interesting proposals for semantics and accessibility, but the fact that it’s an application of XML makes it utterly inappropriate for web pages, at least until the day we have really good authoring tools. Handcoding XML is not a good idea in a production environment, due to its draconian error handling.
XHTML2 and (X)HTML5 aren’t compatible, and their progress appears to diverge. I think it would be difficult to reconcile them into a single markup language.
4. What do you say to people ‘using‘ XHTML ?
Grow up! 
Seriously, XHTML is long dead, due to a decade of horrible abuse. Not even the bleached bones remain.
Web Standards & Browsers?
5. Why should Web designers always respect Web standards?
For the same reason that other professionals should respect the standards of their business. It makes life so much easier for everyone – browser vendors, web designers and developers, users, …
Anyone who tried to create web sites during the Browser Wars of the late ’90s will know what I mean .
6. What’s your favourite browser and why?
Opera. It’s the most standards compliant browser, which means it’s easy to see if I got my stuff right. It also comes loaded with tons of useful features (and, admittedly, quite a few I haven’t yet found a use for). It’s more customisable than any other browser and it’s available for lots of different platforms. I use it with GNU/Linux at home and with Windows XP at the office, and it looks and works exactly the same. I even use Opera Mini on my mobile.
I rarely use the mouse when I browse, preferring keyboard navigation. And there’s no browser that beats Opera when it comes to keyboard navigation!
7. Which Web browser do you think is going to gain even more market shere in 2009?
I really wish I could say Opera, but I don’t think it will happen. I’m sure IE8 will take a large piece of the cake when it’s released, regardless of how good (or bad) it turns out. I also think it’s quite possible that Chrome will increase its share – possibly at the expense of Safari and/or Firefox.
8. Anything you want to add?
You really don’t want to ask a chatterbox like me that question! I can talk ’til the cows come home, you know that.
But I’ll settle for, ‘Thanks for letting me use your soapbox for a while.’
I enjoyed having Tommy answering these questions that might briefly summarize the actual situation when it comes to HTML, XHTML and HTML5. I think this short interview will be a good and fast to read reference for many web designers. I hope you enjoyed it too and that it will help you making the right decisions when it comes to web design and web development. To make this blog post even more interesting I am including Tommy’s HTML Guru list! check it out
So You Want To Be An HTML Guru?
Try this list compiled by Tommy Olsson based on articles published on SitePoint:
I may add another nice article: Learn HTML and CSS: An Absolute Beginner’s Guide by Ian Lloyd.
Stay tuned for the next posts of the “WEB STANDARDS ARE THE ONLY WAY!” series! Don’t forget to subscribe to be notified via RSS or E-mail.
SitePoint HTML & CSS references:
Opera is great for standards.
web standards are important but I also don't like to waste time either.
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I am so excited for HTML5!
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I wonder what html6 will bring
hope useful options for better applications
Your explanation about the topic is very clear. Everyone can understand.
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Is it really worth it to pass the W3C Markup Validation, I actually stick to what I have learned while i was studying, which is a bit ancient compared to the tags on today html5, been a bit lazy learning the new stuff..
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Serving XHTML 1.0 as text/html isn't as harmless as you indicate. Please read these two pages for full enlightenment:
http://www.spartanicus.utvinternet.ie/no-xhtml.ht…
http://www.hixie.ch/advocacy/xhtml
Rather than just calling my arguments bogus, you would gain more points by actually addressing what is wrong with the arguments.
As for changing coding practices but not producie XHTML 1.0, why? Producer's have limited resources for validation purposes. As an author it is much easier to add the self-closing tag (which also has valuable pedagogical effects) and add an xmlns attribute (which provides additional information and therefore is not superfluous just because one UA or another UA might not make any use of the information) and then be able to validate against XHTML1.0, then to validate against HTML 4, and then manually check to see if other syntactic requirements are met.
What I meant by applying your word "fantasy" was that I was suggesting we should get a better text/html parser than the HTML5's parser, which focuses on the needs of Microsoft more than on the needs of HTML users and authors (I am working now on speccing just such an improved parsing algorithm).
In any event, this misses the point of what I'm suggesting (again caught up in pissing contests instead of engaging arguments). The point is that the parsing should typically be done client-side. In that way the user/author sees the results of their parsed string. However, instead of submitted the original parsed string from the user/author, the CMS should proceed to XHTML/UCS (ISO10646) serialize the DOM produced by that string and submit that to the server. The CMS should then only add that content as a child of other content. No more well-formedness errors, no more surprises, etc. With the errors that occurred on this page (following that approach), the worst we would have seen is perhaps a broken link (which is far superior than entire threads disappearing from the page).
I think the reason you're arguments keep reducing to "it is bogus" is because you can't come up with a better argument. For example it is not bogus to consider a document that conforms to XML, XHTML 1.0, and XHTML 1.0 recommendations as not an XHTML document. The metadata content-type passed along with the document indicates the content-type/media-type of the document and it provides an authoritative indication to the UA on how to process the document. But it cannot change the document into something other than what it is. If the document is sent in one second as text/html and the next second as applicaiton/xhtml+xml (just as Shelly does), does the document get transformed from one form to another. No, what is happening is that the server or some other protocol is changing how the document is processed. We must still be able to understand that the document is different from how it might be parsed at one time or another. Or consider the extreme example where a hard link points myxhtml.html => myxhtml.xhtml (where the filename extensions are mapped to the usual mime types). What kind of file is that if it conforms to XHTML 1.0 appendix C and its DOCTYPE delcares it as XHTML 1.0 file? Is that a bogus XHTML file? Or is it a genuine XHTML file? If it is a bogus XHTML file, then I guess I shouldn't be so concerned with things being bogus. But I'd rather we stop using the word bogus in that way because it scares people away from using XHTML because they think bogus might be a bad thing.
Let me take just the one issue of using the user's own browser to parse as text/html rather than doing so server-side. The reason to serialize client-side is because that step eliminates any surprises because the user has an opportunity to view a DOM/Infoset of what they entered and can verify the content parsed as it is meant to parse (the user could even verify the links are not broken if they bother to get that detailed). Then it is a great benefit to send an XML serialized instance of that DOM/Infoset to the server to remain pure XML from that stage onward until nearly the end (if the final consumer of the content needs to have text/html parsing again). By keeping it XML through out the middle stages, it simplifies processing greatly. The parsing of XML is understood much better than text/html style parsing. Each browser has its own idiosyncrasies when it comes to parsing and many CMS deployments add even more bizarre quirks to text/html parsing (html5lib included). Keeping it XML (and UTF), as much as possible would solve many of the problems plaguing CMS administrators. The server needs an XHTML1.0 appendix c compliant serializer and the client javascript needs to serialize as XHTML (of any stripe). That's a much simpler approach to the dizzying approaches emulated in one CMS after another.
One more thing I'll say about santizing. While server-side santizing does nothing to diminish the benefits I just outlined, I will say that server-side santizing tends to be way too aggressive, often removing accessibility related content or deciding that nesting lists three levels deep is a sign of insanity. Obviously scripts and maybe stylesheets should be sanitized, but too often sanitizing is abused.
@me
That certainly is one possible metric. And the HTML5 parsing algorithm does a fairly good job by that measure. However, the WhatWG refuses to add some features of IE to the algorithm to give Microsoft the upper-hand (which creates trouble for authors and users) For example, IE8 permits XML-like syntax within elements containing colons in their names, but WhatWG blocks any attempt to bring such foreign element name parsing to their algorithm.
I'm using several metrics however. I would like to see a new text/html parsing algorithm support XML-like void element syntax for all unknown (non-HTML) elements (not only those with colons in their name and not only those with namespace declarations, though I'd like to see text/html parser support for namespaces too). Such parsing improvements allow the HTML vocabulary to evolve even without switching to XHTML (though it also renders IEs strategy of stifling XHTML moot as well).
@me
That should have read
@Jacques Distler wrote
From the continued tone of your responses, I get the feeling you're not actually trying to engage in the discussion, but again simply trying to score some points in a pissing contest. So I'll simply leave the discussion by trying to respond substantively one more time.
If you're not privy to the internal workings of the server in question, then you're not really the subject of this conversation. This has been about producers of content and what type of content they should produce and the ways they should go about producing that content. By definition, these producers know the inner workings of the server or other mechanism by which the content is produced, manipulated and finally vended to an unknowing client like yourself. Certainly I'm not telling the client to consumer of content to produce XHTML. The client consumer of content should produce nothing in that role, but simply consume the content with the data (including metadata) delivered.
You and I know that IE will never support XHTML. That's why we're so persistent with the HTML5 group. That's why answers from the group that people wanting to use RDFa should use XHTML are not acceptable.
The real issue: will IE support SVG, if it becomes incorporated in HTML5. In the meantime, I make do with my uses of SVG, which does have broad support, and RDFa, which browsers ignore, but that's OK, other agents consume. But to use them, I use XHTML. agree with you, if you though: if you're not using something that requires XHTML, you should use application/xhtml+xml. But you can still use XHTML as your markup.
Sorry, I'm having the worst darn time with these comments. Anyone else having problems? I meant you should NOT serve pages as XHTML if you don't need the functionality. Especially if you allow comments.
Again you're using wild innuendo with no evidence to back it up. First of all if you think XHTML 1.0 conforming documents suddenly become something else when the sever says they are text/html, then you don't understand what you're talking about. An XHTML 1.0 document is one that conforms to the requirements for document production of XML and XHTML1.0 So a document that conforms to XML, XHTML1.0 and XHTML1.0 appendix C is an XHTML document. You can call it a faux XHTML document, but then you're using the word faux in a way unlike anyone else who is conversant in English (and I imagine French too).
So you're using the same old tactics we've seen again and again with this nonsense. You're discussing what happens when an author who has produced XHTML 1.0 document transitions to deploying those documents as XML parsed documents. This is a completely different topic then the one that Josh is asking about (if I understand Josh correctly). The example of the site that broke was misusing an input element in HTML. That misuse became critical when the document was moved to XML (many things do). And yes HTML is semantic in that an 'input' element is designed for the input of text (among other things) that has no line breaks in it and a 'text' area element is designed for the input of text that has line breaks. If they turned around and once again deployed that fixed XHTML document as text/html it would again work fine.
So yes if you create a document that is not working as XML document and try to deploy it as an XML document, it won't work. However, if you're authoring a document to XHTML 1.0 appendix C standards and you deploy it as text/html, it will work just fine. Authoring to XHTML1.0 is a best practice approach. You're innuendo (and at this point fabrication in calling XHTML 1.0 conforming documents faux XHTML), is clearly false. You're "evidence" doesn't even support what you're saying (it supports something else, but it doesn't support any problems with authoring content to XHTML standards).
I too don't want authors to get confused about the two possible mime types to use for XHTML content. There is a difference in deploying content as XML content. However, the problems are all about going from text/html to application/xhtml+xml and very little about going in reverse. Authoring to XML (and XHTML appendix C) standards will actually reduce headaches (even when deployed as text/html).