molly.com
Thursday 29 July 2004
utterly, miserably, completely
UTTERLY, MISERABLY, COMPLETELY. XML has failed on the web. Do you agree? Mark Pilgrim dove in and said so.
But wait! Before telling us of all the failures of XML, Mark points with finger in cheek at some true successes of XML. I’m here to defend the very aspects of XML’s influence that he’s pointing to, although I feel a bit more enthusiastic.
XML has been shown to be effective for:
- supporting multilingual document encoding
- improving ‘tag soup hell’
- providing the basis for syndication feeds, no matter the format
multilingual documents
How many folks out there are creating documents in other languages, or in multiple languages? How about supporting character sets across browsers and platforms? XML in cases like these is your friend, and cases like these are important now and will be more important as time goes on.
improving ‘tag soup hell’
Nearly every person who transitioned from tag soup into more semantic markup in HTML 4.01 Strict and XHTML 1.+ knows that the influence of XML on how we write and use our web documents is indisputable. CSS is part of the reason, because the separation of structure and presentation becomes imperative.
providing the basis for syndication feeds, no matter the format
RSS of any version, Atom, whatever. Syndication is pushing the Web forward, no matter your holy war.
Filed under: standards, blogging, software
Posted by: Molly | 5:42 pm |
July 30th, 2004 at 2:51 am
Character encoding can be taken care of in basically any document format, just use UTF-8 and you are sure you cover all characters Unicode released.
I think that XML is a great format for inventing new languages, like XHTML, but the well-formedness rules, as currently set up, kills it. (Internet Explorer not supporting XHTML is probably part of it as well.)
July 30th, 2004 at 6:04 am
Although the current state of XML served over HTTP is pretty lousy, it will improve as web servers stop serving documents as ‘text/*’ and begin serving them as ‘application/*(+)xml’.
So, XML may have failed so far. But only served over HTTP, and only up until now. The situation will get better, for sure. Both Apache and IIS will e.g. serve Atom files as ‘application/atom+xml’ in their next upgrades, so I presume they will serve plain XML documents as ‘application/xml’ as well.
July 30th, 2004 at 10:05 am
What about IE is it that goes wrong with XHTML? I’m creating XHTML 1.0 transitional & strict documents that seem to work fine (aside from the idiotic CSS problems, of course).
July 30th, 2004 at 11:17 am
Timothy: Mark, Anne, and Asbjørn are all referring to the fact that XHTML, which is an XML document, should be served and interpreted as application/xhtml+xml rather than text/html. Some servers and browsers (IE) don’t support this and this is where the argument comes into play.
If you’re serving XHTML as text/html (and you probably are) then there’s really no problem - all browsers will interpret it, but they’re doing so as HTML. So the purists don’t like it, understandably.
Here’s a helpful article that explains the issue a bit more: http://www.webstandards.org/learn/askw3c/sep2003.html
July 30th, 2004 at 11:05 pm
About ‘text/xml’, I read it will be deprecated in an update of RFC 3023 in favor of ‘application/xml’ of course.
The problem with XHTML as text/html is that it isn’t XHTML anymore. Only the DOCTYPE says so, but a DOCTYPE isn’t really relevant.
July 31st, 2004 at 1:17 pm
[…] ent, Anne van Kesteren claims that “. . . a DOCTYPE isn’t really relevant” [1]. For the theoretician, perhaps this is true. For the practitioner, […]
August 3rd, 2004 at 1:59 am
If you serve XHTML as ‘text/html’, then it’s not XHTML. It will not be barsed as XML, and shuold, by a conforming SGML parser, be parsed as invalid SGML.
If you do content negotiation to sniff ‘application/xhtml+xml’ conformance in user agents, you should really replace the XHTML DOCTYPE with an HTML DOCTYPE, and replace all ‘/>’ with ‘>’. Serving XHTML as ‘text/html’ is almost just as bad as serving HTML as ‘application/xhtml+xml’. Almost.
October 3rd, 2005 at 12:56 pm
web hosting web hosting
July 21st, 2006 at 2:38 am
Very Very nice information here… Thanks
February 15th, 2007 at 6:02 pm
http://cizksig.com
August 26th, 2007 at 4:29 am
Hi
Need sex with local girls click here aarens dating directory online services
http://aarensdatingdirectoryonlineservic.blogspot.com
Bye
April 9th, 2008 at 7:07 pm
what do you want to learn about css? we can help easily
May 1st, 2008 at 7:54 am
it is easy to find it on google