why *not* XHTML

2008-06-07 @ 15:41#

interesting post here from DeWitt Clinton on why XHTML may not be the best thing to use for web documents. i've got mixed feelings. it's one thing to *produce* XHTML. not a simple thing, but do-able. it's quite another thing to *consume* XHTML. that's much harder and - in some cases costly and buggy.

imho, there is no reason to *not* produce XHTML. esp. if you are building an app the generates markup. it also think it's a mistake for human-facing clients to *require* XHTML for consumption. today, common browsers will even render malformed HTML. throwing errors when encountering malformed XHTML is just dumb.

i like the footnote best:

Footnote, a few of the other axioms that inform my thinking on this:
  1. HTML is intended to be written by humans (by hand).
  2. HTML is intended to be displayed to humans.
  3. Machines that want to interpret HTML need to act like humans, and not the other way around.

code