rjelliffe@a... wrote:
> But does WF actually catch the kinds of errors people make? Or does it
> create the idea and requirement that some things are errors, and allow
> people think they have achieved something by conforming to it, that they
> have worked hard, whereas in fact they are little further advanced than
> they would have been otherwise? Does XHTML merely pander to neat-freaks?

If you're scripting HTML, writing well-formed XHTML makes life vastly 
more predictable.  The same is true to a lesser extent of CSS.

It's not just human neat-freaks - it's the computer neat-freaks too. 
And if you want to see where giving up on that dream leads, I'd 
recommend reading the HTML 5 material on parsing:

<http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/WD-html5-20090423/syntax.html#syntax>

Yes, that's a real document.

> XHTML will always be necessary, because XSLTs that generate HTML need an
> HTML formulated as XML. I don't think that the number of documents
> delivered over the web using XHTML is a relevant metric.
> 
> I would prefer if HTML was reformulated as a three layer technology:
> 
>    Wiki -> HTML -> XHTML
> 
> reconstructing more of what SGML did but cleanly. Something like this
> seems much more doable under the aegis of a single WG.

I don't think that's why this is happening, though.

-- 
Simon St.Laurent
http://simonstl.com/

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