Re: XHTML 2.0

I think the first paragraph below is the reason that so many coders (myself
included) have had so many headaches with this subject.  Somewhere along the
line we got herded into accepting the concept that our pages should look
identical in all browsers. From that point onwards we have been fighting a
losing battle to win an impossible war funded by unsuspecting clients.

Different browsers display documents differently. This is a bigger deal
nowadays since there are more complex sites involved and there are not heaps
of VC cash laying around to fund this crazy tail-chasing.

You're right, Mike: trying to make a given XHTML web page display
identically across 5 different browsers is a losing and frustrating effort.
Clients still call for it, but I am doing my damnest to educate them: NN4
doesn't display the page like IE6 does because NN4 is a different browser.
NN7 displays a page differently from IE6 because...well, because people who
use NN7 prefer the way it displays pages.  Presumably, that's why they use
it.

One thing that gives me hope: there's less difference between the display of
an XHTML page from IE6 to Mozilla 1.1 than there is from either of those to
NN4. Perhaps the next year or two will be hard, but I have always been one
to look a bit further ahead than that...:).

D


----- Original Message -----
From: Mike Taylor

Without some creative browser sniffing and alternate pages for several
browser types, in addition to some added JavaScript DOM-related snippets,
you can't easily make XHTML appear consistent across all the popular
browsers.

XHTML may make sense if you're in love with how much XML is already changing
your life at work, but for right now and into the next year or so it's going
to be quite a challenge to make the successor to HTML compatible with most
browsers. That cannot be denied.

And that's my point!  That's it!  I don't want to get into a "How great our
lives will be once XML is ubiquitous" war.  If you love XML, great.  XHTML,
for now, is a royal freakin' pain.

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