Re: OT: Defending HTML4

On Fri, 9 Jan 2004, Mark J. Reed wrote:

> On Thu, Jan 08, 2004 at 10:11:35PM -0600, Axiem wrote:
> > So here's the thousand shells question: is it worth learning XHTML1 + CSS at
> > this point, or is it better to just wait until XHTML2 + CSS comes out and
> > makes it all nifty (at the risk of breaking IE)?
It will break every current browser. IE, however, is now an inseperable
part of the Windows operating system, and so no-one running versions of
Windows up to and including XP (and quite probably Longhorn) will be able
to use it if they're using IE. Users of Mozilla, Opera etc. will be able
to upgrade.

> It's definitely worth learning the current standard.  If you wait for it
> to be perfect, you'll never learn it, because it never will be.  And
> besides that, all the changes to date have been evolutionary, not
> revolutionary; someone who went to sleep in 1995 and woke up today
> would have no trouble reading an XHTML document, although a few of the
> elements would make them go "hmm."
Whereas XHTML2 *is* revolutionary. Someone who only learnt XHTML2.0 won't
understand a HTML 4 document, and our Rip van Winkle wannabe will be
similarly lost. (Frex the <img /> tag is gone from XHTML 2.0, replaced
with the nested <object /> (which you can use in XHTML 1, but Internet
Explorer is Special and doesn't understand it at all properly), or <p />
will finally be able to contain things like tables and lists, or <h(n)>
are replaced by something like <section><heading>blah</heading>
<section><heading>blah</heading></section>.)

--
Tristan

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