Web Coder Plus

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.

digg story

I stumbled across a link at digg.com to a page that looked like it was the latest Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox. Titled, Why Ajax Sucks (Most of the Time), I read it and was completely unaware that is was a spoof until I got to the following section:

When It’s OK to Use Ajax

If you are working in a Web2.0 company that needs to provide evidence of their technical expertise in order to gain new clients. However, you must remember to keep your offering in beta and make sure that it in the same family as these examples:

• geotag-based apps via flash
• tag-based instant messaging via Ruby on Rails
• community podcasts via api mashups

LOL

At that point I actually looked at the URL, and after looking at the page again found a link to Confusability which then lead to the article this spoof was made from.

It got Ajaxian.com uptight, and a very long post explaining why he was wrong got posted before they realised it was a spoof.

It was believable though

The original 1996 anti-frame article didn’t need much modifying at all to sound at least marginally convincing, though I’d say that AJAX has more place in web development than frames ever did.

I posted a link to an Ajax Mistakes article early last month, that I felt was very comprehensive list of issues one might run across when designing an AJAX application.

SWiK.net now has the article as a collaboration which will hopefully make the list even more comprehensive and helpful. There are of course additions from the rabid AJAX-can-do-everything crowd who will scream blasphemy at even the most reasonable of points, hopefully though as more and more people pay attention to the issues the average quality of AJAX apps out there will increase, and even these people will realise constructive criticism is a good thing.

Many of us have grown to accept the Internet in its current form as a given. It is just there, it has been there for a while now, and it always will be right? Not necessarily!

Down here in South Africa, I pay more in one month for my ADSL (3GB cap, 512kbps shaped) than I do for an entire year of web hosting at Lunarpages (my web host: 400GB per month + much more). Read the rest of this entry »

As I mentioned a while back, I was going to give 9Rules round 3 a bash (it now looks pretty certain that I didn’t make it in).

Well with the last day upon us, and there is apparently Still a lot more to go. More than 100 and less than 500 was Scrivs answer to the numerous “How many?” questions; though it’s not surprising it has taken this long given the huge number of entries.

While such popularity may make the workload a bit much, the end result is the quality of sites chosen is even higher, so even if you don’t get in, 9Rules will definitely remain the place to go to, to read intelligent and interesting blogs.