crazed monkey

Mark Pilgrim: The tag soup of a new generation. Mark spouts off on something which I have been thinking about for a while now. How will people who can barely handle HTML make proper use of XML, and all the restrictions which accompany it? Many HTML document authors barely adhere to a proper element structure, let alone ensure that they make use of the proper case, use character entities where appropriate, or enclose all attributes within quotes.

And you want to move towards replacing a WWW full of HTML documents to one full of XML documents? Are you sure? Because realistically, all you’ll manage to do is replace a morass of bloated, poorly written, invalid HTML documents with a morass of bloated, poorly written, invalid XML documents.

Let us not forget element naming, which, like any other naming, is an art. I don’t trust the same people who include <div class="bold">Heading</div> or <div class="center">Title</div> in their documents, rather than use either presentation-neutral class names or the already-provided HTML logical styles, to come up with proper names for their XML elements. I can barely come up with proper element names and I actually care. Similarly, I don’t trust those who believe one requires JavaScript to submit a simple HTML form to give enough thought to their document structure.

Like Mark, I am choosing to stick to the confines of HTML for my web documents, and, given that I have been tweaking the structure of my weblog since I started it back in July, I am still having difficulty getting it just right.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 31st, 2002 at 4:01 pm and is filed under computers, internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.