XHTML is not for Beginners?
Lachy’s Log has a somewhat controversial post, titled XHTML is not for Beginners, that is getting quite a lot of attention. And no wonder, to go out there and say that beginners should not be taught XHTML is going to get people talking.
XHTML: It’s all or nothing
The problem is of course that true XHTML is not supported by IE6 (or IE7 either), so any XHTML web page automatically has to be served as text/html. This immediately gives us a situation where the XHTML does not have the strict requirements that XML should have, and of course what results is XHTML that will not survive the transition to XML.
Is it that bad?
Many seem to think so. There is a long list of standards you can break and get away with when serving your XHTML as text/html, and in that distant day when you decide to move to true XHTML, your perfectly validating XHTML pages will break.
I don’t think this means we shouldn’t teach XHTML to beginners. There are many benefits to teaching XHTML, and even though the final results may make true XHTML standards supporters cringe, the result will still be closer to an XML compliant design than if we teach beginners HTML 4.
To get their pages to validate, new users will have a little more to learn, such as making sure all elements have end tags and enforcing case sensitivity in their CSS. And the end result won’t be perfect; but they will have learnt more, will have unlearn less at a later date, and will have more reason to move over to true XHTML on that distant day when all major browsers support it properly.
RSS Feed
