Markup: HTML and XHTML

NOTE: This section is no longer maintained.

Welcome to goer.org's Markup Central. This section is my repository for (X)HTML-related articles, external reading, posts, and experiments.

Articles

• The X-Philes: A list of sites that have managed to pass the XHTML 100 test suite. The failure rate in the general XHTML population is about 99%, and even the W3C fails.

Useful Reading

• Çelik, Tantek. XHTML 2.0 Considered Harmful. "I think there needs to be a serious reconsideration of XHTML2 as an effort at all."

• Çelik, Tantek. XHTML 2.0 Considered Hopeful. "After being beaten to a pulp by all manner of theoretical academicians, professionally inexperienced markup geeks and XML fascists... the voice of the professional and pragmatic web community and companies at large has won out (for now)..."

• Cline, Ernest. Poor little old <a>. "Let's face it. There is very little purpose that <a> serves in the current working draft."

• Distler, Jacques: Validating Comments. "Try it out! Type a comment and preview it. Try seeing what happens if you stick in some invalid HTML. Nifty, huh?"

• Doctorow, Cory: Metacrap. "People lie. People are lazy. People are stupid."

• Hixie, Ian: Serving XHTML as text/html Considered Harmful. "It is suggested that XHTML delivered as text/html is broken and XHTML delivered as text/xml is risky, so authors intending their work for public consumption should stick to HTML 4.01."

• Karppinen, Marko: State of the Validation 2002. "[I]t would be understandable to assume that the w3c member organizations are on the forefront of web standardization efforts. I've had, for some time now, a sneaking suspicion that this wasn't the case. So today I've confirmed my hunch."

• Koch, Peter-Paul (for evolt.org): Forward compatibility and web standards. "In my opinion the current definition of forward compatibility in web design leans far too heavily on web standards."

• Pilgrim, Mark: A warning to others. "Someday, I'll upgrade myself from 'SHOULD NOT chase after bleeding edge technologies that don't solve real world problems' to 'MUST NOT chase after bleeding edge technologies that don't solve real world problems.'"

• Pilgrim, Mark: Semantic obsolescence. "I bought into every argument the W3C made that keeping up with their standards, validating with their tools, and using their semantic markup would somehow 'future-proof' my site and provide some mystical 'forward compatibility'. How about some fucking payoff now? How about some fucking compatibility?"

• Pilgrim, Mark (for XML.com): The Road to XHTML 2.0: MIME Types. "Now here's a dirty little secret: browsers aren't actually treating your XHTML as XML. Your validated, correctly DOCTYPE'd, completely standards compliant XHTML markup is being treated as if it were still HTML with a few weird slashes in places they don't belong."

• Willison, Simon: Living on a knife edge. "I'm going to keep serving this blog as XHTML as an open experiment in the practicalities and challenges involved in doing so, but from now on my other web projects will target HTML 4.01 Strict."

• W3C: Semantic Web Activity Statement. "Facilities to put machine-understandable data on the Web are quickly becoming a high priority for many organizations, individuals and communities. The Web can reach its full potential only if it becomes a place where data can be shared and processed by automated tools as well as by people."

• W3C: XHTML Media Types. "application/xhtml+xml SHOULD be used for serving XHTML documents to XHTML user agents. Authors who wish to support both XHTML and HTML user agents MAY utilize content negotiation by serving HTML documents as text/html and XHTML documents as application/xhtml+xml."

• W3C: XHTML 2.0 - Introduction. "Because earlier versions of HTML were special-purpose languages, it was necessary to ensure a level of backwards compatibility with new versions so that new documents would still be usable in older browsers. However, thanks to XML and stylesheets, such strict element-wise backwards compatibility is no longer necessary..."

• Zeldman, Jeffrey: OBJECT of desire. "That many designers might never use the emerging specification does not seem to bother most of the framers of XHTML 2, nor does it seem to make them question the value or practicality of what they are creating."

• Zeldman, Jeffrey: The truth about standards. "Yet lately some emerging specifications seem to have wandered away from the idea that standards are supposed to help people solve real problems in practical ways."

• Zeldman, Jeffrey: XHTML2 and all that. "But the W3C could rename the specification they are now calling XHTML 2. They might call it AML (Advanced Markup Language) or MML (Millennial Markup Language) or anything else they like."

Markup-related Posts

• December 05, 2006: Revenge is a Dish Best Served Cold: Now fast-forward a couple of years. XHTML was the W3C's baby. But with a not-particularly-long snippet of JavaScript, Sam Ruby has kicked the chair out from under XHTML. Actually, that's not really the right image. Imagine a man with a chiseled jaw in a nearly immaculate tuxedo, Agent XHTML, clinging desperately to the edge of a sheer cliff with just two fingers.

• December 02, 2006: Tutorial Sneak Preview: Elements vs. Tags: Now that you possess this valuable information, you're in the same position as someone who knows that in the phrase "That's not my forte," the word "forte" should be pronounced fort, not for-tay. You get to feel slightly superior to people who say for-tay, but you really shouldn't go running around correcting them.

• November 21, 2006: How to Convert AuthorIT to DocBook: Congratulations, your document is now DocBook! Well, more accurately, it's "DocBook". Just be happy your tables made it through, sort of.

• October 31, 2006: Have You Hugged Your Local Browser Developer Today?: Look, go ahead and serve up "XHTML" as text/html. Really! So what? Yes, yes, if you actually served up your page with the right mime type so that it actually got parsed as XML instead of invalid HTML, your website would completely fall over. But hey, no worries!

• October 07, 2006: X-Purgation Part II: Wait... I'm on vacation! Why am I writing about X-Philes stuff?

• May 31, 2005: Dumb and Dumber: The impostor's home page is a cheesy blinky flashy games portal, so it's not obvious at first glance why they would want to errr, mirror the Drexel Math Forums. You would expect to see a blinky banner ad over the stolen content, but none appears. Actually, if you view source, there is a banner ad at the top... but the link to the image is broken! As Columbo would say, "Dis is a puzzler."

• November 13, 2004: X-Purgation: So at great personal expense, my crack team of PricewaterhouseCoopers auditors worked night and day to compile a full compliance report. Of the three X-Philes tests, the auditors only conducted the first test ("The Simple Validation Test") and the third test ("The MIME-type Test"). As for validating three secondary pages ("The Laziness Test"), I am sorry to report that we simply could not include this metric in the test suite given current budgetary constraints. Look, when these guys are costing $54,000 a week, you have to cut corners somewhere.

• November 08, 2004: When All Else Fails, Read The Directions: First, Carroll has set the height and width of his scrollable section to "100%" instead of a fixed size. This means that the box automatically expands as large as it needs to be to contain its content. Therefore Carroll's scrollable section always is large enough to contain all of its content; therefore overflow never kicks in; therefore the section never generates the desired scrollbars, no matter how much "Bah Humbug" text Carroll adds.

• October 30, 2004: HTML House of Horror: Markup... from the FUTURE!: When my innovative theories on the nature of spacetime came to the attention of the Institute for Theoretical Physics, the scientific orthodoxy moved quickly to silence me. I was turned out on the street, with naught but a spare cryopump and a broken dilution refrigerator to my name. They called me mad, mad! Fools! I've showed them all!

• September 16, 2004: Make Money Fast with Clean Markup:

  To be sure, thinking in BizDev does not come naturally to most folks, certainly not me. So first, a short cleansing ritual, to prepare the mind for these alien thoughts:

  Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Forbes R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn! ROI! ROI! ROI! Aiiiiieeee!

  Ah, there we go. Now, consider a largish commercial site...

• June 26, 2004: Atom IDs: What's Wrong With Domain + Timestamp?: Because I'm such a forward-thinking, progressive guy, I'm not asking my wife to change her last name -- in fact, I've decided to change my last name to hers. Henceforth I am to be known as "Evan Goer Nahasapeemapetilon." And to really drive the point home to friends and family, I'm dumping goer.org for a more appropriate domain name. So now to the really important question: what does that do to my Atom entries?

• May 27, 2004: All Things In Moderation: After all, these days the issues seem to revolve around such things as the semantic meaning of the <div> element and how many <h1> elements can dance on the head of a pin are allowed on a single webpage.

• May 18, 2004: Now With Advanced HTML Technology: How exciting! I almost opened up the style attribute, so that you all could chew me out in large, red Comic Sans MS. But bold will have to do.

• January 20, 2004: Helpful Fascism: One commenter on Dave's weblog said that he dreamed about a "fascist" browser, one that would refuse to display any page with any errors. Unfortunately, a recent weblogs.mozillazine.org server error swallowed that comment forever. It seems that the Great Spirits of the Internet have spoken. Fascist browser: bad idea. Let us never speak of it again.

• January 14, 2004: Happy, Happy Machines: Our software uses XML all over the freaking place. We use XML for our configuration files, XML to communicate from our machines to our customer's machines, and so on. Machines happily consuming XML from other machines. It works just fine, thanks.

• November 03, 2003: The MARQUEE Element: Revolutions: Unfortunately, no one can be told what Evan's Matrix stylesheet is. You have to see it for yourself.

• October 26, 2003: HTML House of Horror: Things That Go <BLINK> in the Night: There are those who believe that there are lines that should never be crossed. There are those who believe that there are Secrets Man Was Not Meant To Know. And then there are those who forge boldly onward on paths where more timid souls dare not tread. In the interest of Science, I have painstakingly constructed the most horrifying web page ever written. Behold! The Page of the Damned!

• October 21, 2003: Worst. Tag. Ever.: So how do you embed SVG in a web page? In theory, you could do it inline... if you served up a pure XHTML page with the right MIME-type, and a carefully constructed DOCTYPE, to the right browser, on every third Sabbath after Simchat Torah.

• September 23, 2003: A Little Too Fussy: Ages ago, our ancient web designer ancestors had only the most primitive tools at their disposal. Fragments of web page source recovered from Lascaux, France reveal evidence of only the simplest table tags...

• September 03, 2003: Son of Bulletproof XHTML: I'm pleased to announce that I am the latest guest columnist for A Second Voice, Dave Shea's collection of articles on standards, markup, accessibility, and more.

• August 24, 2003: Nobody Beats Up My Little Brother But Me: But have they fought with it for hours? Have they tried to scroll through a styled table with hundreds of cells on an old UltraSparc? Have they had to explain to users that disabling JavaScript also secretly disables style sheets (even though the two options are separate checkboxes that sit right next to each other)? In short, have they bled?

• August 07, 2003: Bulletproof XHTML: Jacques Distler's got it. So does Yuan-Chung Cheng. Dave Shea's working on it.

• August 05, 2003: Orthodoxies: The real problem is that XHTML is being touted as a replacement for HTML. It's not. XHTML is a different technology that suits different purposes. There are a lot of influential people who are blurring this distinction, and I'd like to think that they know better.

• July 04, 2003: XHTML2 Explorations, Part II: In the last installment of XHTML2 Explorations, we touched on how XHTML2's attribute collections provide a rich variety of behaviors for nearly all elements. Today's installment focuses on the individual elements themselves.

• July 01, 2003: XHTML2 Explorations, Part I: But even with all the healthy public discussion, XHTML2 is a big specification (430 KB and counting). At least for my own edification, it's time to see how deep the rabbit hole goes.

• June 12, 2003: I Think We Can All Be Proud: But hey -- let's ignore all those distinctions. If you can't compare apples and oranges on the Internet, where can you compare them? Parnas reports a 99% failure rate. In contrast, I report an Markup Geek failure rate (as measured by Test #2) of a staggeringly low 90%. I think we can all be proud.

• May 11, 2003: Look Ma, Another XHTML Post: It's become clear that I need to make some clarifications in how the tests work -- that I have to state a couple of things explicitly, and that I might need to tighten up the rules to close some loopholes. In the meantime, we muddle through, as we must.

• May 09, 2003: The X-Philes: Note that I tried to add the W3C Markup pages to the list, but failed.

• May 06, 2003: Put Your Shades Away for a Minute: Reformulating your site as XHTML requires a major rethinking of everything you are doing. Proceed with caution. Ask yourself why.

• May 04, 2003: Open Season: Of course, this doesn't preclude me from padding the numbers by starting arguments with myself.

• April 29, 2003: The XHTML 100: "Listen! And understand! That Validator is out there. It can't be bargained with! It can't be reasoned with! It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, EVER... until you are validated!"

• April 22, 2003: Reload Assiduously: "Zombies are supernatural beings, therefore difficult to kill. Repeated shots are necessary to stop them as they rush headlong toward the player. He must not only be alert to the appearance of zombies from any quarter; he must be assiduous about reloading his gun periodically, lest he be overwhelmed by the rush of the zombies when his gun is empty."

• April 20, 2003: We Have a Winner!: After browsing his site for a while, I have come to the inescapable conclusion that Jacques Distler may well be the only person on the planet who understands the XHTML 1 specification and uses it properly.

• April 19, 2003: Well, not ALL standards are crap: Heck, why keep the poor little old <a> tag, anyway?

• April 16, 2003: Are Standards Crap?: And yea, they shall smite the wicked users of table-based layouts with brimstone and fiery ash, and the righteous shall be redeemed. By their XHTML2 DOCTYPEs shall ye know them.

• April 14, 2003: It Bleeds, It Bleeds...: Not to say Safari doesn't have its little quirks.

• March 15, 2003: More or Less Geeky: Replacing Nancy and Mike are two cute, athletic college girls, which -- I know -- I know -- is truly awful, isn't it? Send your sympathy cards for Sammy here, I'll collect them and forward them in due course.

• March 05, 2003: Driven Up the Wall: For that matter, both men strike me as equally heartfelt and sincere. Purdy just seems to drive more people up the wall. He's a gifted young man.

• November 09, 2002: Evolution: In a sense, Intelligent Design has... evolved from its predecessor.

• October 24, 2002: Babe in the Woods: "Well, I think I'll call Elana," he said. "If you cannot be turned to the Dark Side, then perhaps she will."

• October 10, 2002: Rank Cruelty: It is indeed a cold, cruel world that ranks Dave Winer lower than Dave Barry.

• September 19, 2002: Fun With Referer Logs: Well, that's the difference between you and the titanic intellects that are responsible for our Internet standards. You know how to spell.

• August 24, 2002: The Cartman Internet: Protecting European and Chinese and Iraqi sovereignty online is certainly possible: it simply requires writing code for an entirely different network that has constant identification and authentication built in at every step of the way.

• August 15, 2002: Zombies: So two stars for you, and phooey on your negativity!

• March 20, 2002: Web Snobbery: A few people don't even bother with the obnoxious little message: they actually kick you out of their site if you don't make the cut. Apparently these people think they are part of some kind of movement.

• February 28, 2002: Why I Support NPR: Well, OK, I still have no idea what a "web services automation" system is. But surprise, surprise -- Moss is selling one!

• October 29, 2001: We All Need Validation: Anyway, for kicks I ran my site through the W3C Validator. Ugh, how humiliating. Unknown character encoding! Unquoted attribute percentage signs! Oh, the horror...