Re: [xml-dev] XHTML 2 Working Group won't be renewed?

[Laurens van den Oever <laurens@xopus.com>]

Simon St.Laurent <simonstl@simonstl.com> wrote:
> If you're scripting HTML, writing well-formed XHTML makes life vastly more predictable.
> The same is true to a lesser extent of CSS.

These problems are often underestimated. An example of the problems
you can encounter using HTML as a content storage format instead of
XHTML or another XML flavor consider the following:

<p class="para">text<ol><li>item</li></ol>text</p>

If you style this .para using CSS you will see that the second text
will not be styled. The <ol> will split the <p> and the class will
only be applied to the first text. This structure is not valid HTML,
but many HTML oriented tools will allow content authors to create such
structure because they are not strict (which is their main benefit).

Similarly:

<div>text<ol><li>item</li></ol>text</div>

vs

<div><p>text</p><ol><li>item</li></ol><p>text</p></div>

Both are valid HTML and will look the same without CSS, but when you
add CSS, both structures will be rendered differently:

ol { margin: 0 2em; }

These and related issues make restyling an HTML content repository
with more pages than you can manually check a nightmare and can make
an investment in X(HT)ML worthwhile.

Best regards,

Laurens van den Oever
CEO, Xopus BV

http://xopus.com
+31 70 4452345
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