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Preparing to adopt XHTML

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by maryweilage

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Tell us what you think about our tip on preparing to adopt XHTML, as featured in our Sept. 10, Web Development Zone newsletter. Do you find this newsletter useful?

14 replies

by trudgian

Interesting. Would have been good to see a few more (brief) examples as in the case example. Rating 3 out of 5.

by alf_booth

I have to agree with Mark in terms of structuring. Many years ago I tried to learn Pascal and Cobol. I found it was easier to deal with Pascal because it was a structured language. If, as Mark states, you open a tag then by the same token expect to close it. If you structure it as Pascal then it makes it easier to read, especially if it's an inherited program, and easier to spot mistakes.

by enewbold

You recommend moving from this:

content

To thi:

content

That's very nit-picky and a matter of personal preference. I prefer the first example because it makes my life extremely easy when scanning through code. All uppercase ELEMENTS, when combined with the normal lowercase content is easier to spot and saves me many hours each month during code reviews. This equates to thousands of saved salary dollars and also frees me up for more productive tasks.

Additionally, everyone already does utilize quotes correctly (as in your example

, so you are stating the obvious.

Bottom line: this article was not very informative or useful to anyone in the real world doing real IT work.

by akersha

I agree 100%. Scanning through 500-1000 lines of lowercase code is for the squawks...

Cheers!

by i_am_whopper

I disagree with part of your argument about the capitalization of elements and attributes. According to the XHTML standard, lowercase is a requirement, not a matter of preference. So if you submit an XHTML document with uppercase elements and/or attributes, it will be rejected by the receiving application. If you must have capital elements, then I like the suggestion someone made further down the thread about converting the page to lowercase after a code review.

I also disagree with your statement regarding the use of quotes for attribute values. I wish that everyone followed this rule, but the last 4 clients (all fortune 500 companies) I have worked for have bad habits of using quotes randomly throughout their HTML. Because most browsers will currently accept unquoted HTML element attributes without a hiccup, many IT shops do not deem the quoting as necessary. I guess if you work in a very small IT shop, on small systems, then you may have the time to go over every line of the HTML, and check for these things. I have always worked with large systems with tight deadlines, where there is only enough time to review the critical portions of the code that provide the core functionality, and definitely not enough time to go through the tens of thousands of lines of ASP and HTML looking for quoted attributes and missing tags.

by webdroid

Personal preference! Please. It's a standard.

The day designer start following standrads is the day IT departments start saving millions.

Let's get real folks. HTML is dead. Long live xhtml, css, ecma script and the dom! Not to mention the allpowerfull and new king of standards xml and all it's precisely defined derivatives.

Peace.

by jplummer

I was surprised that the Set 10 newsletter article was both
1) so basic, and
2) so short on information.

It basically pointed out what could be said in a succinct paragraph, with little mention of the full constellation of reasons for and benefits of making sure your XHTML code is XML-compliant. With no mention of structural markup, required attributes, etc., it seems like the author phoned this one in. 2 of 5 since there didn't seem to be any errors.

by alias88

These are the same hints I read the last time I worked in xml 1.0 in 1999 and I couldn't really a large incentive to adopt (or not to) this style back then either. Is there ever really going to be a need that pushes people towards xhtml or is this just another buzz, albeit a quick one that doesn't have much to it?

by stu (uk)

Adopting XML coding practices has to be an essential for any developer considering his clients' futures.

Desktop IE may be the dominant browser today, but there are so many new platforms emerging (TV, Phone, Kiosk, Palmtop, Appliance etc.) that even if Microsoft dominates on all these, a significant change of coding practices will still need to be made by developers in order to take advantage of the real future time-savers like XSLT.

A few simple changes:

1. Use double quotes for all attributes.
2. Use lower-case tags.
3. Nest your tags properly.
4. Close all tags (that means
and too!)

and a quick compliance test on w3c.org and you're on your way to being future-proofed.

by webdroid

I would like to add another important coding practice...

A proper doctype! I'd say a minimum of 90% of the worlds web sites will soon be obsolete, simply because they do not bother to add a proper doctype!

It's sad. This article is already twoyears behind the times and people still don't get it.

Respectfully.

by akersha

Though this may sound like a great idea, in practice it makes more difficult to maintain/debug a page. Using CAPS for elements makes them clearly visible against all the rest of the code on the page. Any current generation html editor can automatically change the case of elements for you if you should choose to make the LEAP to XHTML.

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