Antanova Ltd. » Web-development

Why I don’t use XHTML

Jason C — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 11:55:59 +0000

Although this is a pretty old topic, and people have decided to come down on one side or the other already, I was reminded of the debate recently. I was looking at some code another dev had done, and was altering it to suit my style more. There was nothing wrong with it, but the tags were done in the XHTML style rather than HTML.

Now, way back when, I thought that XHTML was going to be the saviour of the web, and it was closely intertwined with the move away from table-layout to a more semantically correct layout. So I have coded a fair few sites using XHTML. In recent years, though, I have switched back to HTML. I have my reasons. And they are:

IE does not support XHTML. It can render (modified) XHTML code served as HTML, but that’s not the point, is it? If you add the proper sections, you then have to comment them back out. That seems to be a waste of time and of bandwidth to me. The XML prologue that should appear at the start of the file has to be removed, too or else IE6 chokes on it. Yes, I still have to support IE6.


In the case of an error in the markup, properly-served XHTML completely fails. Now, this can be a benefit, as it will show the error up during testing and force you to output well-formed XHTML, but I’m not sure I trust all the JavaScript based editors that many users use to input content with to output flawless code every time.
The JavaScript document.write cannot be used. Adding elements using DOM methods is better, yes, but sometimes a quick hack is what’s needed, or code from an external source (like Google Analytics, for example) uses it.


I expect things to change on the code front as HTML 5 becomes more supported and as I start to integrate its code into my sites. It might mean that the move to XHTML starts to make more sense than it does to me right now. It’s something I will keep reassessing, and if I read a convincing enough argument to change then I will.



Google Chrome
Jason C — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 18:46:00 +0000
As you will of course be aware, Google has released its new browser, Chrome. I’ve tried it out briefly, and everything seems hunky-dory. I think I’ll use it to access Google’s own apps. As for day-to-day browsing, I think I’ll stick with Firefox. After all, can I really trust Google not to harvest data relating to my web browsing? I don’t think so. Also, there’s no No Script available for it, without which it’s a bit difficult to block Google Analytics.
On the plus side, another browser is a good thing. It gives people another choice other than the dreadful Internet Explorers. Yes, and I mean IE7, too. Chrome uses the Webkit rendering engine, so there shouldn’t be any real surprises in rendering.
Let’s hope this comes out of beta soon, along with IE8 and we can start using some CSS3. How I long for that day.



A night at the Opera
Jason C — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 20:58:00 +0000
Firefox has become over the years an indispensable tool for me as a web developer. Firstly, its standards support for css is very good, even if the current stable release doesn’t pass the Acid2 test. The extensions that are available for it are both numerous and useful, none more so than the web developers’ toolbar.
Trouble is, with all those extensions loaded onto it, it becomes one heavy browser. That means that when I’m off duty and just surfing around, I notice things like the pause between clicking the “new tab” icon and being able to type anything in the address bat of the new tab that just opened.
Enter Opera, a fast, light browser that until now had been on my machine just for testing. It’s so quick, sometimes I’ve finished reading a page before I’ve even clicked the link to visit it. And the back button is the fastest I’ve ever seen. Javascript-wise, it’s very quick too, just a tad behind Safari in my experience. Most sites work fine with it, but sometimes I find I have to fire up Safari instead, although that’s surprisingly rare considering its market share and my expectations.



Many hands make… bad work?
Jason C — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 15:25:00 +0000
Sometimes a quickie is just what’s needed. No talk, just something quick-and-dirty. It was thus, like some street hooker getting into a kerb-crawler’s car, that a job came in to do some amends to a very small property site, and I said “yes.”
The working files were duly sent over, along with a short list of amends to do. “Easy enough,” I thought. Nothing, however, prepared me for the horror of opening up the html files and finding what looked like the untidy mess of innumerable freelancers that had been there before me.
The site was misconceived from the start, encasing the whole site in flash, and using pop-up html windows to show the “zoomed” state of photos. Oh, and there were also a couple more pop-ups for good measure with actual content within, laid out using tables, of course. It was these pop-ups that I had to amend. They had used a mish-mash of inline attributes (bgcolor), a linked stylesheet that was not there any more, another linked stylesheet, and styles contained within