Re: switch to XHTML

[Robert J. Slover]

It has been a long time since I read the standard, but my understanding
of the issue is that XML is character-sensitive, not case sensitive.  It is
specified to support markup tags in a large variety of languages, without
having to build into every parser the knowledge of the glyph matching
rules for every human language.  English and other European languages
generally have upper and lower case...some other languages do have
more character modes than 2.  It is an engineering tradeoff.

Jeff Teunissen wrote:

> Gregory Martin Pfeil wrote:
> >
> > On Tuesday, March 5, 2002, at 07:11  PM, Jeff Teunissen wrote:
> >
> > > Gregory Martin Pfeil wrote:
> > >
> > > > eg:
> > > >         In HTML, you can use upper, lower, or mixed-case tags and
> > > > attributes
> > > >         In XHTML tags and attributes must be lower-case
> > >
> > > This is one of the dumber things to have taken place under the aegis
> > > of the W3C, and one of the reasons HTML won't be going away any time
> > > soon.
> > >
> > > W3C isn't supposed to be in the business of creating policy, or
> > > legislating style.
> >
> > This isn't a style issue. XML is case sensitive. When creating XHTML the
> > W3C were forced to choose upper or lower case. It's not possible with
> > XML to have case insensitive elements. The W3C chose lower case because
> > modern text editors have syntax highlighting, and lowercase is easier to
> > read.
>
> It certainly *is* a style issue, because XML is a W3C standard itself. W3C
> have had *no* trouble replacing one style with another, historically. To
> suggest now that since they made a stupid decision some time ago they must
> continue it today is beyond silly. Case sensitivity in a markup language
> designed to be parsed by MILLIONS of machines, and produced by THOUSANDS of
> people, and it's case sensitive? It is to laugh.
>
> > The reason for the widespread move to XML is to resolve a lot of the
> > issues that existed in SGML (which HTML is defined in). SGML is so
>
> A "widespread move to XML", presumably from SGML? Uhh, yeah. Relatively few
> people were ever using SGML in the first place, so it's not widespread at all.
>
> There is no widespread move to XHTML. Most of the 'net is ignoring it
> entirely, because it offers _no_benefits_ over HTML -- all it does is remove
> choices. Especially when it's never(*) going to be implemented in a real
> browser, because it would horrendously break when viewing all of those
> standards-compliant documents that happen to be based on an old standard that
> is no longer in "fashion". Feh.
>
> > complex that no one would write a browser with an SGML parser, it would
> > be much too large and slow. Instead, they read the HTML DTD and
> > implement it all by hand. With XHTML, any XML parser can handle the
> > format simply by loading the DTD. A new version comes out, just grab the
> > new DTD. With HTML a new DTD meant a lot more hand coding.
> >
> > In other words, XML is an attempt to make the document writer's life
> > easier by making it easier for developers to write standards-compliant
> > applications.
>
> There are more standards than there are applications to comply with them.
> Every new standard, including XHTML, makes the problem worse.
>
> --
> | Jeff Teunissen  -=-  Pres., Dusk To Dawn Computing  -=-  deek @ d2dc.net
> | GPG: 1024D/9840105A   7102 808A 7733 C2F3 097B  161B 9222 DAB8 9840 105A
> | Core developer, The QuakeForge Project        http://www.quakeforge.net/
> | Specializing in Debian GNU/Linux              http://www.d2dc.net/~deek/
>
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