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XHTML Club

xhtml.club

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Re: XHTML Club

#11
Valid pure HTML 4.01 (1) made in 2025 counts?

I don’t thing it’s about luddites as website mentioned. Many professions have tools suggesting that person have extensive experience and in terms of web development, XHTML 1.0 or old standards of HTML are such.

1. https://www.tirreno.com

Re: XHTML Club

#12
post #2

In the linked article: > you should master the HTML programming¹ language The footnote reads: > 1. This is a common debate - but for simplicity sake I'm just calling it this. It's not really a debate, HTML is a markup language [1], not a programming language: you annotate a document with its structure and its formatting. You are not really programming when you write HTML (the markup is not procedural) (and this is no…

What happens if I simply add an iterator mechanism to HTML (well, I guess we need variables too)? Is it no longer a markup language here (I won't add anything else): Better question, why don't we upgrade XML to do that?

That's not technically HTML anymore.

But if you disagree with this, or somehow work around this statement by replacing your for element with some "for-loop" custom element (it is valid HTML to add custom tags with dashes in their names), my stronger argument is at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46743219#46743554

Re: XHTML Club

#13
I used to create a number of simple web pages in XHTML back in the days when we believed XHTML was the future. Recently, while going through and restructuring some of my old "online stuff", I learned that XHTML really isn't in a state that I'd want to use it any more:

* XHTML 1.0 and 1.1 are officially deprecated by the W3C.

* XHTML5 exists as a variant of HTML5. However, it's very clear that it's absolutely not a priority for the HTML5 working groups, and there's a statement that future features will not necessarily be supported by the XHTML5 variant.

* XHTML5 does not have a DTD, so one of the main advantages of XHTML - that you can validate its correctness with pure XML functionality - isn't there.

* If you do a 'view source' in Firefox on a completely valid XHTML 1.0/1.1 page, it'll redline the XML declaration like it's something wrong. Not sure if this is intended or possibly even a bug, but it certainly gives me a 'browser tells me this is not supposed to be there' feeling.

It pretty much seems to me XHTML has been abandoned by the web community. My personal conclusion has been that whenever I touch any of my old online things still written in XHTML, I'll convert them to HTML5.

Re: XHTML Club

#14
post #4

It’s ironic that the very site in question, despite claiming XHTML compliance, is served as text/html instead of application/xhtml+xml, so the browser will never parse it as XML. To quote [0]: > All those “Valid XHTML 1.0!” links on the web are really saying “Invalid HTML 4.01!”. Although the article is 20 years old now, so these days it’s actually HTML5. Edit: Checked the other member sites. Only two are served as a…

>>these days it’s actually HTML5.

There is no HTML5. It's just a buzzword. https://html.spec.whatwg.org/dev/introduction.html#is-this-h...?

Re: XHTML Club

#15
post #2

In the linked article: > you should master the HTML programming¹ language The footnote reads: > 1. This is a common debate - but for simplicity sake I'm just calling it this. It's not really a debate, HTML is a markup language [1], not a programming language: you annotate a document with its structure and its formatting. You are not really programming when you write HTML (the markup is not procedural) (and this is no…

I dunno, you're being pedantic :) Yes yes, the name clearly ends up "Markup Language" so yeah, with a very strict definition of programming languages, HTML is not one of them. But if we use a broader definition, basically "a formal language that specifies behavior a machine must execute", then HTML is indeed a programming language. HTML is not only about annotating documents or formatting, it can do things you expect…

I'm not sure we can call your parent comment pedantic. They're just being correct. Is it pedantic to say that fish is not a fruit? It's just correct to do so.

If anything, it is the act of stretching the definition of "programming language" so much that it includes HTML as a programming language that we should call pedantic.

Re: XHTML Club

#16
post #2

In the linked article: > you should master the HTML programming¹ language The footnote reads: > 1. This is a common debate - but for simplicity sake I'm just calling it this. It's not really a debate, HTML is a markup language [1], not a programming language: you annotate a document with its structure and its formatting. You are not really programming when you write HTML (the markup is not procedural) (and this is no…

I think that it is a debate, and it depends on the role of HTML in your system. If all you're doing is using HTML to "annotate a document with its structure and its formatting", then yes, I'll accept that it's not quite programming, but I've not seen this approach of starting with a plain non-html document and marking it up by hand done in probably over two decades. I do still occasionally see it done for marking up…

> React JSX, or Django/Jinja templates

Those are not HTML. PHP neither, even when used as a templating language for HTML.

> htmx endpoints

Not really familiar with htmx, but I would say this is HTML augmented with some additional mechanisms. I don't know how I would describe this augmented HTML, but I'm not applying my "not programming" statement to htmx (I probably could, but I haven't given enough thoughts to do it).

> In this sense, I'm not putting on a different hat when I'm working on the html, but just working on a different part of the program.

I agree with this actually. I wouldn't consider that writing HTML (or CSS) is really a separate activity when I'm building some web app.

Re: XHTML Club

#17

Valid pure HTML 4.01 (1) made in 2025 counts? I don’t thing it’s about luddites as website mentioned. Many professions have tools suggesting that person have extensive experience and in terms of web development, XHTML 1.0 or old standards of HTML are such. 1. https://www.tirreno.com

It does not? HTML 4.01 is not XML. So not XHTML. What's the confusion?

Re: XHTML Club

#18
I was in college when XHTML was all the rage and everything we wrote had to pass validation. I still get uncomfortable adding breaks without closing them.

Re: XHTML Club

#19
In the early 2000s I was 100% sold on the idea of strict XHTML documents and the semantic web. I loved the idea that all web pages could be XML documents which easily provided their data for other sources. If you marked your document with, an XHTML 1.0 Strict or XHTML 1.1 doctype, a web browser was supposed to show an error if the page contained an XML error. Problem was, it was a bit of a pain to get this right, so effectively no one cared about making compliant XHTML. It was a nice idea, but it didn't interact well with the real world.

Decades later, I'm still mildly annoyed when I see self-closing tags in HTML. When you're not trying to build a strict XML document, they're no longer required. Now I read them as a vestigial reminder of the strict XHTML dream.

EDIT: I just checked, and my site (at least the index page) still validates! https://validator.nu/?showsource=yes&doc=https%3A%2F%2Fander...

EDIT2: Hey, look, if you still want to use self-closing tags where they're not required: go nuts! I'm just explaining why I don't use them anymore.

Re: XHTML Club

#20
post #4

It’s ironic that the very site in question, despite claiming XHTML compliance, is served as text/html instead of application/xhtml+xml, so the browser will never parse it as XML. To quote [0]: > All those “Valid XHTML 1.0!” links on the web are really saying “Invalid HTML 4.01!”. Although the article is 20 years old now, so these days it’s actually HTML5. Edit: Checked the other member sites. Only two are served as a…

>>these days it’s actually HTML5. There is no HTML5. It's just a buzzword. https://html.spec.whatwg.org/dev/introduction.html#is-this-h... ?

That's a stretch. Your link says

> Is this HTML5?

> In short: Yes.

See also [1].

That HTML5 was used in marketing doesn't make the technical term disappear. HTML5 is a bit more precise than HTML, it refers to the living standard that's currently in use, as opposed to HTML 4.01 and the previous versions of HTML.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5

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