Antanova Ltd. » html

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.



Code bits: PHP date year box script
Jason C — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 15:44:00 +0000
Creating a warranty registration form for the proud owners of a new LCD panel should have been a very straightforward job. Well, actually it was, but that sort of interrupts the flow of this post a bit, so I’ll skim over that inconvenient fact.
For the ‘date of purchase’ field, I simply added the day and months items as 
    
    




So there you have it. HTH, and all that.



IE6 bullet aligned to bottom of list-item (LI)
Jason C — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 12:43:00 +0000
I just thought I’d jot this down for posterity as I’ve seen it before but not often enough for me to remember the solution. Posting this should help that, though.
When using LI in IE6, if the LI has hasLayout activated, then the corresponding bullet will be aligned to the bottom of the item instead of the top. Why the devs writing IE6 thought that this would be useful I don’t know. Or perhaps, it’s a bug? The shock of it all.
The solution is to target the LI and to disable hasLayout. The method I used today was this:
li {zoom:0;}

This directly countermands the zoom:1; I had added to other elements to get the page to hang together in IE6.



solution #2
Jason C — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 09:55:00 +0000
It seems that there is more than one way to skin a cat. Ages ago I wrote about a mad IE duplicating text bug that would repeat bits of content lower down on the page. It had me scratching my head for a little while wondering how IE could be home to yet another bug, especially one this weird. My old friend Google came to the rescue in the end, showing me a cure.
Now though there appears to be a new and even simpler cure. The problem occurs when you have two floats, and comments between them. The solution I used previously was to remove the comments, but now it appears that another fix is simply to add display:inline to the css rule for the floats. I pretty much do that automatically now, to avoid IE doubling the margin around floats, so it fits right in, and means I can forget about removing comments from my code.



I ordered the sauce
Jason C — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 14:50:00 +0000
Having just deployed the latest release of design agency Outburst’s website, I was again thinking about the order of source in html, and how I would put the content first in that site. I could use absolute positioning, but I don’t think that would work in cases where the font size had been increased by the user, or where the user’s display has a resolution greater than the default 96 dpi.
In a spare moment, I did a quick search and found an old but pretty informative presentation and article on exactly that, where they’d done a little bit of user testing. It’s so hard to find that kind of hard information I thought I’d pop a link up here.
http://www.usability.com.au/resources/ozewai2005/



Code bits: US states select box
Jason C — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 15:36:00 +0000
…and some more useful stuff. A select box, this time with the states of the USA listed along with their two letter codes as the values.
That site’s a honeypot of resources too; I recommend reading it.



Code bits: Country select box
Jason C — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 14:34:00 +0000
Here’s something that has been burning a hole in my library for a while and I never thought to put it up here. Thankfully, now I have realised that it could be useful to my colleagues around the world (although in this version the UK is selected). It was fully revised in March 2007 from ISO 3166-1 Alpha-2 country codes. Each country’s corresponding “value” property is the two-letter country code from the ISO. Use it in your code freely, but please link here if you want to share the code with others. Enjoy…