[consulting] XHTML doctype

Tue Mar 10 06:48:52 UTC 2009

You are starting to see the ongoing debate ;p

We have enough breaks from standardization already on the internet. 
Adding the wrong DTD to a HTML document offers absolutely no benefits 
over well-formed HTML.

If you are using the XHTML DTD simply because you like the W3Cs 
validator to ensure matching tags etc., just override the doctype when 
doing the validation. There is a nice little box there expressly for 
that purpose - just change it from 'auto-detect' to 'XHTML 1.0 
Transitional', and leave the HTML DTD in your document.

It's not worth breaking from the standard for the type of reasons I 
usually see in this debate. They shouldn't have to always build in a 
'backwards compatibility' mode for people who don't want to put the 
effort into conforming to a standard - that defeats the whole purpose of 
creating standards in the first place. It's kind of the 'Microsoft 
mentality'. We need to make all our websites jump hoops for IE because 
MS found it easier to ignore the standards as well.

Here's a challenge: next time a client asks for his site to be done in 
XHTML, deliver it in XHTML like they ask for, and see if they enjoy the 
debugging. Or at least explain to them exactly what XHTML is, and why 
they probably don't actually want it.

Brian

Jeff wrote:
> Thanks Troy and Brian for your help with Firebug. I see it now.
>
> I have to admit, this whole topic leaves me a bit confused as to  
> current best practice. If I look at some "big" sites, I'm not seeing  
> any consensus. Drupal.org is XHTML, apple.com isn't. Then I see that  
> the new Microsoft site is XHTML... ? Ironic? And on your referenced  
> site (http://www.webdevout.net/articles/beware-of-xhtml#broken_xhtml)  
> about half or more of the "big-name" web-standards people are doing  
> xhtml served as html...
>
> Like Ng said, clients want XHTML, but as you have pointed out,  
> probably all based on a misunderstanding.
>
> I don't really fear apache (or the like) changing something drastic  
> without some kind of backwards-compatibility option. So pragmatically,  
> with a site design life-span of certainly no more than 5 years (more  
> likely 2-3), does it really matter that much?
>
> Jeff
>
> On 10/03/2009, at 2:21 PM, Brian Vuyk wrote:
>
>   
>> Jeff,
>>
>> Quick comment, in the previous email, I wrote 'application/html' a lot
>> when I should have written 'text/html'. Oops!
>>
>> To check with firebug, just click on the 'Net' tab in the Firebug
>> window. You may need to click a checkbox to enable 'Net' at this point
>> for drupal.org (or whatever site).
>>
>> The 'Net' tab should now load up with all requests that your browser
>> made to display the page you are looking at. The top one should be
>> 'drupal.org'. If you click to expand it, you should see both the
>> Response Headers and Request Headers. In the Response Headers, look  
>> for
>> the 'Content-Type' line.
>>
>> You will see that for Drupal.org, it is 'text/html', which means  
>> that it
>> is treating what it gets back from the server not as XHTML, but as
>> regular good old tag soup HTML.
>>
>> I should just clarify that writing a document that validates as XHTML,
>> but serving it as HTML isn't that bad from a practical perspective at
>> this point in time - the XHTML syntax is (by necessity) understandable
>> by the HTML parser. It's more or less a restricted subset of what HTML
>> allows with different comment strings. However, it is the *wrong*  
>> way of
>> doing it. That is, it is misusing a standard. And while it works for
>> now, it's not guaranteed to be future proof.
>>
>> Let's say there was a new release of Apache that adjusted the content
>> type based on the declared DTD, or something along those lines.
>> Immediately, millions of sites would break. Sticking to the  
>> established,
>> documented standards helps 'future proof' your work to a certain  
>> degree.
>>
>> Brian
>>
>>
>> Jeff wrote:
>>     
>>> Thanks Brian, a most interesting topic.
>>>
>>> Firstly, a silly question — would you mind telling me how to use
>>> Firebug to examine the response? I looked everywhere and didn't find
>>> the "application/html" you mentioned.
>>>
>>> Second, since sites such as drupal.org are written in XHTML,
>>> presumably they too are not being served with an xhtml mimetype or IE
>>> would die on them, as indeed would any browser if a node had invalid
>>> markup (quite possible, since d.o allows user-submitted HTML markup  
>>> to
>>> a degree sufficient to break XHTML structure).
>>>
>>> Jeff
>>>
>>> On 10/03/2009, at 12:09 PM, Brian Vuyk wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>       
>>>> Jeff,
>>>>
>>>> Perhaps the quickest way to tell what content type the server uses
>>>> when sending a page is to use firebug and examine the response. For
>>>> the site in question, it shows 'application/html' instead of
>>>> 'application/xhtml+xml' as would be required to trigger the XML
>>>> parser XHTML is supposed to use. The content-type sent by the server
>>>> is what most major browsers (Firefox, Opera, Safari, and possibly
>>>> IE) use to determine how to interpret the content - not the DTD.
>>>>
>>>> As long as your browser is treating the site as application/html,
>>>> it's just tag soup, and you don't get to take advantage of any of
>>>> the functionality unique to XHTML. In short - your document is
>>>> parsed as normal HTML, not XHTML.
>>>>
>>>> XHTML does have some validation issues that can be a pain, including
>>>> the escaping you need to do in certain circumstances, such as when
>>>> dealing with arguments in linked URLs.
>>>>
>>>> XHTML, when parsed as XHTML instead of HTML, is not tolerant of
>>>> mistakes in the 'well-formedness' of the document. Any mistakes,
>>>> such as mismatched tags, invalid elements or invalid usage, will
>>>> cause the parser to fail with an error message to the screen. Now,
>>>> just wait until a client edit his own content and tries to wrap a
>>>> <h1> with <strong> tags. Suddenly, the page they were working on
>>>> only shows a big nasty error message.
>>>>
>>>> Internet Explorer does not support XHTML without some nasty non-
>>>> standard hacks. I am not sure whether IE8 handles this correctly -
>>>> it would surprise me if they did. There is a semi-functional
>>>> workaround: http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/2004/xhtml-faq#ie
>>>>
>>>> I think http://www.webdevout.net/articles/beware-of-xhtml is a very
>>>> good read for any web developer considering writing a page in XHTML.
>>>> It does a good job of describing both the benefits and pitfalls of
>>>> using XHTML.
>>>>
>>>> Regards,
>>>>
>>>> Brian
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Jeff wrote:
>>>>
>>>>         
>>>>> Did either of you actually turn Javascript off and reload the site?
>>>>> I'd have thought it fairly common knowledge that Superfish menus
>>>>> degrade without JS, relying on the semantic and validating <ul>
>>>>> foundations of the underlying menu markup to do the work when only
>>>>> CSS
>>>>> is available.
>>>>>
>>>>> George, if you can put together a site like the demo in 10  
>>>>> minutes or
>>>>> so, please get in touch with me asap, we can make you rich :)
>>>>>
>>>>> I'm not saying this demo site or the theme are earth shattering  
>>>>> and I
>>>>> have no connection with fordrupal themes whatsoever (never heard of
>>>>> them or their founders before), nor do I have the need to ever  
>>>>> buy a
>>>>> theme, but honestly George, it feels like you have other reasons  
>>>>> for
>>>>> being harsh on this.
>>>>>
>>>>> Anyway, of more interest to me is Brian's xhtml comment — is this a
>>>>> server config issue? How do you know it's not sending it as
>>>>> application/xhtml+xml? I thought the browser looked at the  
>>>>> doctype in
>>>>> the markup?
>>>>>
>>>>> "Future validation headaches" — are you refering to html 5? Isn't  
>>>>> it
>>>>> realistic to think that xhtml is going to be supported until half  
>>>>> the
>>>>> people on this list have retired, given the ongoing infestation of
>>>>> Internet Explorer and its associated lack of speed of  
>>>>> improvement? In
>>>>> other words, isn't the web moving so slowly (because of IE and the
>>>>> w3c) that xhtml is going to be around for many years yet?  
>>>>> Drupal.org
>>>>> and Garland are both xhtml.
>>>>>
>>>>> Jeff
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> On 09/03/2009, at 11:46 PM, Brian Vuyk wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>           
>>>>>> That is a fairly attractive theme visually. However, George makes
>>>>>> some
>>>>>> good points about it w.r.t the JS menus.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Why XHTML? Your server isn't sending the site as application/xhtml
>>>>>> +xml,
>>>>>> so the user is getting none of the benefits of XHTML with all the
>>>>>> future
>>>>>> validation headaches.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Brian
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>             
>>>>> _______________________________________________
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>>>>> http://lists.drupal.org/mailman/listinfo/consulting
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>           
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