{"id":373,"date":"2004-07-24T01:05:18-04:00","date_gmt":"2004-07-24T09:05:18+00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterjanes.ca\/wordpress\/?p=373"},"modified":"2004-07-24T01:05:18-04:00","modified_gmt":"2004-07-24T09:05:18+00:00","slug":"xhtml2-mixed-metaphors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterjanes.ca\/blog\/2004\/07\/24\/xhtml2-mixed-metaphors\/","title":{"rendered":"XHTML2 mixed metaphors"},"content":{"rendered":"

There’s been a lot of hubbub about XHTML2 being incompatible with XHTML1 and HTML. Of more concern to me (in this post, anyway) is an inconsistency in the XHTML2 spec itself, one that I haven’t seen considered<\/a> by the hoi polloi<\/span>.<\/p>\n\n

Several attributes in the current draft of XHTML2<\/a> are specified in a form that’s tied to transmission protocols. One example, the type<\/samp> attribute<\/a>, states that it is a comma-separated list of media ranges… as defined [in the HTTP specification] as the field value of the accept request header.<\/strong><\/q><\/p>\n\n

Why is this bad? Most other attribute values in all versions of HTML or XHTML (XHTML2 included) use space-separated values<\/em>; among them are the core attribute class<\/samp>, the document properties attribute resource<\/samp>, the object module’s archive<\/samp> and the table module’s headers<\/samp>. The only ones that don’t are used to specify values that may include spaces, which MIME types can’t<\/a>. Added to this, there’s no way to efficiently parse comma-separated values using CSS selectors<\/a>, XPath<\/a> or XSLT<\/a>, to name but a few of the current golden children of the W3C.<\/p>\n\n

Making these values conform to the format of what is, ultimately, an unrelated specification–not to mention one that’s divergent from current\/expected\/common practice–is a bizarre choice, and one that seems predicated on making implementation easier for browser makers than authors (and authoring tools). Look at IE7<\/a> and Sjoerd Visscher’s XHTML2 sample<\/a>; if nothing else, they show that the browser isn’t the bottleneck in adoption of new technologies.<\/p>\n\n

The W3C’s making a mistake if it’s making XHTML2 harder on content creators than it already is. The reason HTML took off–and why other things<\/a> didn’t–can be summed up with a meme<\/a>: It’s the authors, stupid!<\/em><\/p><\/div>

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