Re: Images & mouseovers

At 04:39 PM 9/23/2000 , John Allred wrote:
>If I create a page using HTML 4.01 + CSS and get it
>to validate, if I want to make it validate under XHTML, all I have to do
>is capitalize the element names consistently, quote all the attributes,
>and terminate all the elements, right? Or is there more?

There's a few other gotchas but that's about it -- put the element
names and attributes in lower case, make sure that there are closing
tags and/or the <tag /> construction for all elements, make sure
attributes are quoted and not minimized (which means checked="checked",
not just checked alone), and a few other things which are listed on
the XHTML spec's backwards compatibility reference:

http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/#guidelines

>Just trying to remember what I read a while back. You guys are getting
>me to thinking that I ought to move my newer work forward to XHTML.

That's what I'd suggest -- there really shouldn't be too much of a
change for people who code like I do (which is to say, with a text
editor -- vim, in my case).  If you're using a WYSIWYG editor then
there may be problems because they might not have XHTML compatibility
modes; obviously that's a case when you wouldn't want to try to
switch to XHTML.  Sites which are heavily templated and the code
is generated by snippets of code may be hard to change, too.

Here's another "Theory vs. Practice" issue:

In _theory_ everyone should switch to XHTML; in _practice_ there may
be many cases in which this is difficult and the benefits of doing
so are not _yet_ widely available.

--Kynn

-- 
Kynn Bartlett                                    mailto:kynn(at)hwg.org
Board Member, HTML Writers Guild                 http://www.hwg.org/
AWARE Center Director                    http://www.awarecenter.org/

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