Re: [Phpwiki-talk] linking scheme and markup

[Gary B. <ga...@in...>]

On Wed, 7 Nov 2001, Jeff Dairiki wrote:

> What exactly are the practicalities involved in converting to XHTML?
> Is it really much of a new paradigm (if so, I don't see it yet) or is
> it just syntactical cleanup?

It's a syntactical cleanup. Chief differences are that

 a) there is no such thing as an empty tag: <hr> in HTML becomes <hr></hr>
    in XHTML. Since this would be a PITA, XHTML has the form <hr /> which
    is equivalent to <hr></hr>

 b) parsing is much stricter:
     | <ul>
     |   <li>foo
     |   <li>bar
     | </ul>
    is illegal in XHTML -- you must close the <li> tags:
     | <ul>
     |   <li>foo</li>
     |   <li>bar</li>
     | </ul>
    The rules of which tags may go where are more strictly enforced.

 c) tag attributes must be quoted. <img src=foo> is illegal: it should say
    <img src="foo"> or <img src='foo'>.

 d) it is case sensitive (all tags are lower case)

Everything on inauspicious.org -- apart from the PhpWiki-based wiki :) --
is valid XHTML -- view the source :)

> Steve, Tara, those who know: If we move to XHTML what are the
> implications for those who use older browsers?

Absolutely nothing -- XHTML was designed so that HTML compliant browsers
wouldn't choke on it. The only problem you get is that some seriously
broken browsers display <hr /> as if it was <hr>/ (ie the slash is
visible), but since such browsers are unlikely to render HTML properly
anyway it isn't worth worrying about.

Gary

[ ga...@in... ][ GnuPG 85A8F78B ][ http://inauspicious.org/ ]