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At 3:12 PM -0700 7/12/04, Joshua Allen wrote:
>I'm really suspicious of calls to rewrite a better, XML-aware browser.
>"Better" is always in theory; in practice you end up with tons of bugs
>and unintended consequences. XHTML purists have had a number of years
>to prove their thesis, and all they have proved is that the "pure" way
>results in yet more complexity for web developers, no appreciable
>benefit, and new bugs.
I'm not sure what thesis you think the so-called XHTML purists are
trying to prove, but the new bugs seem mostly to be in Microsoft
products and the benefits are quite clear. XHTML vastly simplifies
machine processing for all sorts of purposes. For instance, I could
not generate RSS feeds for my web sites if they were not well-formed
XML. Perhaps I'm not an XHTML purist (well-formedness works fine for
me; I don't need validity) but it is obvious that if more data were
available in well-formed HTML, I could do more cool things with it.
For instance, why should Amazon/Google/EBay etc. have to provide
separate interfaces to the same data for web services and for
browsers? Why can't one suffice for both? If they were using XHTML or
XML, instead of HTML, one set of pages would serve double duty.
--
Elliotte Rusty Harold
elharo@metalab.unc.edu
Effective XML (Addison-Wesley, 2003)
http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/effectivexml
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0321150406/ref%3Dnosim/cafeaulaitA
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