Re: switch to XHTML

[Gregory Martin Pfeil]

On Tuesday, March 5, 2002, at 07:11  PM, Jeff Teunissen wrote:

> Gregory Martin Pfeil wrote:
>
> > eg:
> >         In HTML, you can use upper, lower, or mixed-case tags and
> > attributes
> >         In XHTML tags and attributes must be lower-case
>
> This is one of the dumber things to have taken place under the aegis of 
> the
> W3C, and one of the reasons HTML won't be going away any time soon.
>
> W3C isn't supposed to be in the business of creating policy, or 
> legislating
> style.

This isn't a style issue. XML is case sensitive. When creating XHTML the 
W3C were forced to choose upper or lower case. It's not possible with 
XML to have case insensitive elements. The W3C chose lower case because 
modern text editors have syntax highlighting, and lowercase is easier to 
read.

The reason for the widespread move to XML is to resolve a lot of the 
issues that existed in SGML (which HTML is defined in). SGML is so 
complex that no one would write a browser with an SGML parser, it would 
be much too large and slow. Instead, they read the HTML DTD and 
implement it all by hand. With XHTML, any XML parser can handle the 
format simply by loading the DTD. A new version comes out, just grab the 
new DTD. With HTML a new DTD meant a lot more hand coding.

In other words, XML is an attempt to make the document writer's life 
easier by making it easier for developers to write standards-compliant 
applications.