dk01 — Wed, 14 May 2003 06:34:01 +0000

Quote: Originally posted by Eskater05
And about IE and NETSCAPE, they have been around for awhile, and like old men, get grumpy and set in their ways.

Hahah great metaphor! Well here is a great place to find browsers for any OS and even old versions of browsers:
http://browsers.evolt.org/

Wonder how they all treat standards.
-dk

brady.k — Tue, 13 May 2003 22:48:26 +0000

Personally, I just finished validating my code. It was a pain, but if you follow the instructions and the w3c.org site, its not that big of a deal. I think that XHTML is the one to validate to, as W3C is trying to push this, and since they pushed HTML (and it became standard) i think this is a good idea also.

XHTML strict isnt a big deal, i took a weekend and did it. It does make a difference, because it makes everything look almost the same.

As for the browsers, I believe anybody that wants to make a browser, should. Whether this is a company or person, it doesnt matter. The more you have, the more it forces you to comply to standards as a webmaster, making your site cross-platformed. And about IE and NETSCAPE, they have been around for awhile, and like old men, get grumpy and set in their ways.

dk01 — Tue, 13 May 2003 05:28:11 +0000

Yes but the great thing is that even though css and xhtml seem sometimes to be closely entwined they are actually so much more separate than before. This means that although initial learing time may be longer, in the long run coders save time on sites. Now this is assuming that a person is fairly well experienced in html and things beforehand. I don't know if we are seeing anyone yet who comes in to the industry and goes directly to designing with web standards like xhtml. Instead there is advice given that says to learn html 4.01 first and then move along from there. This is fine but I am wondering what percentage of people actually decide to move on to xhtml after they start with html 4.01? I mean I would expect it to be a small percentage of webmasters. In this regard I am optimistic about whether standards will pick up and gather force or whether they will be this sort of suggestion that only a small percentage of websites actuallu use.
-dk

Suzanne — Tue, 13 May 2003 00:52:06 +0000

A number of people (including zeldman.com ) recommend using transitional for many reasons. I use strict for my own personal sites, and anything from html 3.2 to xhtml 1.0 strict for professional sites, depending on the client needs.

The thing with standards is that choosing ONE standard to follow, regardless of what that standard is, is the ideal. Different market, different standard. Well formed HTML 4.01 Transitional, using table layout with CSS augmentations? Super! Well done!

Busy — Mon, 12 May 2003 22:54:31 +0000

The thing that gets me about the XHTML standards thing is a lot of people think XHTML is only the strict version. They try it, fails in the browsers so they give up using it.
No one worried about HTML standards while they were around and now people jump up and down because the browsers can't do XHTML strict properly, what ever happened to XHTML transitional ?
The other thing you have to remember is that CSS is NOT apart of XHTML, it's a side dish, but people seem to think CSS is XHTML.
[/end rant]

JustLurkin — Mon, 12 May 2003 20:46:51 +0000

Couple of Opera 7 observations: Opera 7 does XML parse all allowed XHTML content types, but it doesn’t currently send anything other than text/html in it’s accept headers http://pgl.yoyo.org/http/browser-headers.php. If you’re testing for acceptance of something other than text/html and using content negotiation to send another content type to XML aware browsers, Opera 7 is still not rendering your page with an XML parser.

Opera did make an important XHTML enhancement with the release of 7.10. Documents with an XML declaration now render in “strict mode.” If your pages are susceptible to box model differences, you might want to view them with the latest release.

dk01 — Mon, 12 May 2003 15:58:46 +0000

Yes opera 7 has very good support for js. They seem to be moving more in the right direction similar to mozilla. IE is still stuck in its non standards slump.
-dk

Megan — Mon, 12 May 2003 13:24:06 +0000

Quote: Originally posted by Renegade
Opera6 on the other hand supports most of the CSS standards except for the ones that make the site look good and help with positioning. For example O6 doesn't or seems to not support 'right:npx;' for some strange reason.

Try using v. 7 - it's CSS support is the best (although that site says that right: works in Opera 5, so I don't know why you'd be having problems).

Sun, 11 May 2003 11:20:48 +0000

I'm new to the valid XHTML camp, but it seems like a good thing to do in my book, so I'm trying to learn more. I found http://www.edgeofmyseat.com a useful resource and learned that I should set DreamWeaver's prefs so that new documents are XHTML compliant.

If you use PHAkt (or IMPAkt) to build PHP/ADODB sites, you might run into a problem with the first line of code:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>'

To work around it, you can swap the first line of code in your PHP files with this:

<?php echo "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"iso-8859-1\"?".">"; ?>
<?php echo " \n"; ?>

If you use DW's built in PHP/mySQL server model, it does this for you when you create a new document.

JustLurkin — Sat, 10 May 2003 08:22:36 +0000

The W3C is strongly encouraging application/xhtml+xml for XHTML 1.1 docs. The other two allowed media types, text/xml and application/xml, are more generic xml media types and user agents might not recognize some XHTML elements and attributes. I understand anyone’s reluctance to use application/xhtml+xml because it is not yet supported by Internet Explorer http://www.w3.org/People/mimasa/test/xhtml/media-types/results . Although there is nothing in the spec. that allows you to send XHTML 1.1 as text/html, some authors do serve application/xhtml+xml to UA’s that accept it, and text/html to those that don’t. This type of content negotiation is allowed and encouraged under the XHTML 1.0 recommendation however. Call me cynical, but I would be afraid to use XHTML 1.1 on a site that I do not maintain until IE becomes application/xhtml+xml aware, and the site has been tested thoroughly.

The code snippet is an XML declaration that is optional, but encouraged. The real kicker is that IE6 renders a document in "quirks mode" when the declaration is used. If you choose to omit the XML declaration, UTF 8 or UTF 16 character encoding must be specified.