Re: TAG case; XHTML; Flame Wars.

At 16:42 27/06/00 +0000, Peter-Paul Koch wrote:
>The WWW is just a section of the Internet specialized in web sites which 
>are written in HTML and viewed with browsers.

This is a very narrow view.  If you are happy to stick to that narrow 
audience - then you may be correct.

XHTML provides a mechanism for backward compatibility which HTML 
doesn't.  There is the advantage you wanted stated.

>So new devices will give birth to new languages, unless they want to plug 
>into the existing WWW right now.

The idea of XML was that it is language-independent.  Current web browsers 
ONLY understand HTML because the HTML specification (or some variation of 
it) is hard-coded into each browser.  That's why web designers have had to 
code multiple pages for multiple browsers with all their proprietary 
implementations of HTML.

New browsers WILL NOT have the specification hard-wired into them.  That 
means they cannot "best guess" what was meant by sloppy code.  The require 
a "well-formed" document in order to "infer" the document structure.  If 
you want an example of language independence, try 
http://203.5.69.47/xmlpage.xml using IE5 or NN6.  The limiting factor of 
these new devices will become their support for the CSS specifications.

 >Isn't the same true for all the things W3C pours over our poor heads?
 >That's the reason why I wrote this article.

If you read the information on the W3C site, you would notice that XHTML 
was designed as an INTERIM measure - a way of easing web designers into the 
type of programming techniques that will be needed in the future.  Yes, you 
can do without it now, but it does have advantages of easing the learning 
curve long-term.

I'll be the first to agree that WAP/WML is still very immature at present, 
but I doubt it will take 5 years to get off the ground.  Things will change 
if there is money to be made.  When you look at the number of mobile phones 
compared to the number of computers, it isn't hard to see that the phones 
win out - e-commerce (or m-commerce as the case may be) will provide the 
impetus.  Large companies are not going to want to write and maintain 2 or 
3 or more versions of the same site for each appliance.

Hmm...perhaps we should move this debate to the Theory list :-)

Chris

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