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XHTML Club

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Re: XHTML Club

#61

Post by strogonoff »

PaulHoule wrote: post #45
strogonoff wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has gotten into the idea of semantic Web long after XHTML was all the rage[0], I somewhat resent that semantic Web and XML are so often lumped together[1]. After all, XML is just one serialisation mechanism for linked data. [0] I don’t dislike XHTML. The snob in me loves the idea. Sure, had XHTML been The Standard it would have been so much more difficult to publish my first website at the age of 14 th…

The semantic web took on the XSD data types https://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-2/ even though a lot of tools and standards (I'm looking at you SPARQL) don't really support them. My favorite serialization for RDF is Turtle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtle_(syntax)

That is a good point, if you consider XSD then that is an XML connection, it starts to become a bit complicated and I see why people start to dislike it. I forget about that because to me it’s just about the idea of a graph, which is otherwise quite elegant. Why not have a graph type-free with just string literals; much richer information about what kind of values go where can be provided through constraints, vocabularies, etc.

My favourite serialisation has got to be dumb triples (maybe quads). I don’t think writing graphs by hand is the future. However, when it comes to that, Turtle’s great.

Re: XHTML Club

#62

Post by jraph »

reconnecting wrote: post #41
jraph wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Valid XHTML 1.0 Strict (or Transitional) is requirements of XHTML club Where do you see this? I see that they do use XHTML 1.0 Strict but I don't see this requirement written. Brad, we need your clarification here, it's critical, we need you to tell us which one of us is wrong! :-)

Thank you for asking. XHTML Members(1): Current websites that are valid XHTML 1.0 Strict (or Transitional) Back to tirreno website, it is a pure transitional HTML 4.01 without JS or CSS, thus more or less same challenges to make it W3 valid (2) in our days. Have a look. 1. https://xhtml.club/members.html 2. https://validator.w3.org/check?uri=https://www.tirreno.com/&...

Damn, it seems you are right!

Still not convinced with your proposal to extend the XHTML club to include valid HTML 4.01, not that I care much anyway :-)

Re: XHTML Club

#63

Post by assimpleaspossi »

jraph wrote: post #58
assimpleaspossi wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Telling them HTML5 does exist does even more harm cause it doesn't exist. Telling them it does exist is entirely wrong and is even a false statement, is misleading and causes confusion.

Ok, I'll bite. Assuming you are right and HTML5 doesn't exist. What would be the actual bad outcomes of the following? - believing HTML5 exists - silently choosing to understand what someone mentioning HTML5 obviously meant

I am right and I gave you the proof. Understanding what one means when mentioning HTML5 has nothing to do with technically understanding that there is no HTML5 standard.

Re: XHTML Club

#64

Post by jraph »

notnullorvoid wrote: post #55

I highly recommend everyone involved in web development to read at least a small proportion of the horrors that are the HTML parser specification. It will leave you yearning for the return of XHTML. Or you could also read web proposals where the reason for avoiding the ideal implementation is complication of updating HTML parser rules. Or attempt to use the web features that are already hindered by the HTML parser (c…

> It will leave you yearning for the return of XHTML.

…or be grateful you can just use an existing HTML5 parser that hides all this stuff to your innocent eyes :-)

Re: XHTML Club

#65

Post by GavinAnderegg »

direwolf20 wrote: post #35
GavinAnderegg wrote: post #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…

You're annoyed when people are trying to keep the dream alive? Since HTML5 specifies how to handle all parse errors, and the handling of an XML self-closing tag is to ignore it unless it's part of an unquoted attribute value, it's valid HTML5.

I'm not annoyed by it when people are trying to make XML compatible documents, but effectively no one is. Platforms like WordPress use self-closing image tags everywhere, but almost no one using WordPress cares about document validation. This ends up meaning that the `` is just an empty gesture.

Re: XHTML Club

#66

Post by jraph »

chrismorgan wrote: post #52
swiftcoder wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Is the page actually being served as "application/xhtml+xml"? Most xhtml sites aren't, in which case the browser is indeed interpreting those as invalid declarations in a regular old html document

If it’s served as XML, then view-source instead highlights the doctype line as an error (“Stray doctype.”).

I can confirm, I'm seeing this on my XHTML pages that are served as application/html+xml, that's a shame.

Re: XHTML Club

#67

Post by PaulHoule »

embedding-shape wrote: post #3
jraph wrote: 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…

One threshold is "can you write a program that might not complete?" You can't in SQL, which makes it less of a programming language than, say, FORTRAN.

If you look at the HTML 5 spec it is clear that it's intended to be a substrate for applications. The HTML 5 spec could be factored into a specification of the DOM, specification of an x-language API for the DOM and a specification for a serialization format as well as bindings of that x-language API to specific languages like Javascript.

Re: XHTML Club

#68

Post by jraph »

assimpleaspossi wrote: post #63
jraph wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, I'll bite. Assuming you are right and HTML5 doesn't exist. What would be the actual bad outcomes of the following? - believing HTML5 exists - silently choosing to understand what someone mentioning HTML5 obviously meant

I am right and I gave you the proof. Understanding what one means when mentioning HTML5 has nothing to do with technically understanding that there is no HTML5 standard.

Let's just say that I don't think the truths you are pushing are as absolute as you seem to think, and I think they are a reflect of how you view the world more than anything.

And that by correcting people that mention HTML5, you will probably just annoy people without achieving anything worth it. That would be true even if you are absolutely correct.

It's peak "well, actually", with the twist it might not even actually be.

That's not the truth, just my opinion, and I appreciate that you might not agree.

Note that OP didn't mention "The HTML5 Standard", they mentioned "HTML5".

Re: XHTML Club

#69

Post by radicalethics »

direwolf20 wrote: post #38
radicalethics wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 basically the design of PHP with different syntax. Nobody uses PHP this way any more though — people treat it like Python or Node and write the entire codebase inside a big JSP is similar with different syntax again — nobody uses JSP either I think ASP too but I never used that

If HTML was never able to be the full solution, then I guess if I had to expand on where I'm going, then what the heck are we even doing with this html thing? Either MAKE IT like PHP, ditch it, or do something, anything.

Re: XHTML Club

#70

Post by PaulHoule »

strogonoff wrote: post #61
PaulHoule wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The semantic web took on the XSD data types https://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-2/ even though a lot of tools and standards (I'm looking at you SPARQL) don't really support them. My favorite serialization for RDF is Turtle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtle_(syntax)

That is a good point, if you consider XSD then that is an XML connection, it starts to become a bit complicated and I see why people start to dislike it. I forget about that because to me it’s just about the idea of a graph, which is otherwise quite elegant. Why not have a graph type-free with just string literals; much richer information about what kind of values go where can be provided through constraints, vocabul…

Because the semantics of numbers and dates matters.

It's absurd that JSON defines numbers as strings and has no specification for dates and times.

I believe we lose a lot of small-p programming talent (people who have other skills who could put them on wheels by "learning to code") the moment people have the 0.1 + 0.2 != 0.3 experience. Decimal numbers should just be on people's fingertips, they should be the default thing that non-professional programmers get, IEEE doubles and floats should be as exotic as FP16.

As for dates, everyday applications written by everyday people that use JSON frequently have 5 or more different date formats used in different parts of the application and it is an everyday occurrence that people are scratching their heads over why the system says that some event that happened on Jan 24, 2026 happened on Jan 23, 2026 or Jan 25, 2026.

Give people choices like that and they will make the wrong choices and face the consequences. Build answers for a few simple things that people screw up over and over and... they won't screw up!

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