Look Ma, Another XHTML Post

By Evan — — Web

The X-Philes grow ever larger. 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. Of particular interest in the latest batch: James Graham, a UK physics student who is embedding MathML in certain pages on his site. (Click to advance through the slides on the MathML page.) Also we must give due respect to St. Raphael Academy, which might very well be the most techologically advanced secondary school website ever. Certainly it beats the pants off of my alma mater’s site, which has lovely bordered frames, scrolling headline text courtesy of the <marquee> tag, and no DOCTYPE, presumably to spare us all from the horror. Of course it is a cash-starved California public school. I blame Gray Davis personally.1

I’ve also added a “Useful Reading” list to the Markup section. This list constitutes a small fraction of the external articles and documents that have been instrumental in shaping my thinking on XHTML and web standards. Of course I can’t begin to list all the articles I’ve read, nor can I provide access to all the personal emails and comments I’ve received of late. My thinking on this issue is still evolving. Still pulling things together. More to come.

1. Apparently so do others. Some people take their school’s website design awfully seriously.

7 thoughts on “Look Ma, Another XHTML Post”

  1. Although by strange coincidence, St. Raphael seems to be down at the time of this posting. Hopefully back up by morning.

  2. Our web hosting company really screwed up the saintraphaelacademy.org account. Luckily, I have backups of the files and database. I’m hoping I’ll be able to at least log in to the server by tomorrow, and I’ll reupload as soon as possible.

  4. I’ve decided to join Thomas Pike and Thomas Hurst in making
    my site output XHTML for those browsers that support it, and HTML for those that
    don’t support XHTML (I’m unsure as to whether to refer to these as
    non-compliant or just non-supporting). I’d like to especially thank to Thomas Hurst
    who sent me the one-line regular expression I needed to do the XHTML-to-HTML conversion.

    You can access these versions (all valid) at:
    (auto-detect) http://saintraphaelacademy.org/
    http://saintraphaelacademy.org/?forceType=xhtml-1.1
    http://saintraphaelacademy.org/?forceType=xhtml-1.0-strict
    http://saintraphaelacademy.org/?forceType=xhtml-1.0-transitional
    http://saintraphaelacademy.org/?forceType=html-4.01-strict
    http://saintraphaelacademy.org/?forceType=html-4.01-transitional

  5. Aggh, sorry you had to experience that downtime. Unreliable web hosts — that’s one problem that even the cleanest XHTML can’t fix.

    I must say that I really like the Xiven/Aagh/St.Raph model of serving up true XHTML to the advanced browsers and true HTML to the older ones. There’s something really clean and aesthetically pleasing with this strategy.

    Still, *five* different DOCTYPEs, Basil? That’s just showing off. 🙂

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