Some of my favorites:
- Wants software to use
<em>and<strong>when the UI says italic and bold.- “Future proofs” a site by migrating from HTML 4.01 Transitional to XHTML 1.0 Transitional and keeps serving it as
text/htmlwith all the old JavaScript scripts in place.- Changes
//ENat the end of the public identifier in the doctype to the language code of the language the page is written in.- Omits the namespace declaration in XHTML or SVG and claims it is OK, because it validates.
- Serves documents written using a home-grown XML vocabulary along with an XSLT transformation to HTML to browsers instead of serving HTML, because XML is more semantic.
I will admit to recently saying alt tag in a forum post, but that was at 5am and I certinally wasn't awake.
Using <cite> to mark up a quote. Wow that's low... Never heard that one before...
Can someone give me some of the reasoning why XHTML served as text/html would render faster? That one has got me completely baffled.
For changing //EN, where were they told to do that?
As for Cyber Dog, that's one idiot. How on earth did he come up with that name... Woof Woof.
Can someone give me some of the reasoning why XHTML served as text/html would render faster? That one has got me completely baffled.
Some browsers, particularly Mozilla and family, render partial HTML documents incrementally but not partial XML documents. So even if a whole XHTML document is parsed and rendered faster than a whole HTML document, incremental HTML display can render the beginning of an HTML version faster.
Claims all tables are evil.
No, not all tables are evil but tables used strictly for the layout of content are evil.
- Claims <b> and <i> are deprecated.
- Uses <span style="font-style: italic;">, because <i> is presentational.
- Wants software to use <em> and <strong> when the UI says italic and bold.
I thought <b> and <i> were deprecated until I read this in the WDG HTML 4.0 Reference: B Tag:
The B element is a suitable choice for marking a structure for which no phrase element exists. For example, vectors in mathematics have no structural element in HTML 4.0, but bold text is often an appropriate visual rendering...
About Henri Sivonen's list: Still hilarious ! And so true...
There's really a lot to learn in those few points if one goes to the bottom of things.
Changes //EN at the end of the public identifier in the doctype to the language code of the language the page is written in.
I thought those were extremely rare (I only spotted one once with //FR, which was never corrected though I told them).
Bonus points of course if the xml:lang or lang attribute is not filled with the real document language.
By the way what happened to www.literarymoose.info? It's been down for weeks (months?).
I just read I'm one of them. Alt-tags are still very usefull in SEO.
Geoffrey Sneddon (comment 1), everyone knows XHTML loads faster because of its smaller file size, compared with HTML. :-)
But if you had XHTML 1.0 Transitional marked up with tables, then it wouldn't be any faster...
One think on the list I'm not so sure about, is the "depreciated" VS. "deprecated".
Deprecated means something that is "belittled" or "depreciated"... so what's the big deal?
Also, in regards to "Uses the XML empty element notation on pages that are supposed to be HTML pages.", is that such a bad thing? For me thats one of the real negatives about HTML, the lack of clarity regarding empty elements.
Rowan, it is a big deal.
Yeah, that helps make the difference clear :)
The point is that XHTML served as text/html is not parsed (nor rendered) any faster than HTML served as text/html.
Dictionary.com has a Usage note
on deprecate:
[deprecate] is now used, almost to the exclusion of depreciate.
However the WWWannabees usage is the opposite: we say 'depreciate' and think we mean 'depcrecate'!
But so what?
you say. Actually, you are right. And the point is not those words ... but to make you think: Hey, they can't even pick the right term ... for expressing their false truth. (Depreciated = mildly disapproved, deprecated = strongly adviced against. If used right. Don't take my word for it.)
Of course I have mixed the words myself. English is just like markup: it is harder than you realize. Or simpler ... There is actually something to understand about markup. You need a good brain in addtion to good moral (moral = «thou shalt follow the standards» ). Keep up the age of enlightenment, Anne!
#Omited in the Howto:
;)
Leif H Silli: realise
It’s probably just my sick mind, but to me How to dive into Mark
sounds perverted on various levels. =p
... always uses "semantic" when they should use "structural". You don't write semantic html by using things like <h1>. Although you can add semantics to your html by using the <rel> and <meta>-tags, most of the webpages only have structural markup, not semantic markup.
Btw, what do you think of <em> and <strong>, why should there be two elements for emphasis, why not something like: <emph level=1> and <emph level=2> or something like that? In my opinion, that's way more generalizing.
What’s exactly the difference in the case of <h1> then? According to the dictionary, semantic means relating to meaning
, which is exactly what <h1> does: it describes the meaning of the element’s content, namely a header (h) of the highest level (1).
(…) which is exactly what
<h1>does: it describes the meaning of the element’s content, namely a header (h) of the highest level (1).
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN">
<title/hello world/
<p>Hello
<>World
One geek-point for the semantics of ‘’. Descriptive markup (‘tags’) just delimits element nodes in the document tree and conveniently sticks a label (generic identfier) on them for later processing. This doesn't have anything to do with meaning, name tokens are pretty impenetrable (P == parking space).
The obvious advantage of descriptive markup is that e.g. a CSS author can change the semantics (specified in the normative prose of some specification and translated to some form of default rendering by an UA) of element types chosen by somebody else entirely, as opposed to procedural markup where they are a fait accompli.
Some of these I always laugh about, especially because so many people/companies say these things.
Well, the h1 doesn't say anything about the meaning of the text within, just that it's a heading. Semantics is all about meaning, and so far a computer doesn't know that <h1>Gas station</h1> is semantically the same as <h1>Petrol Station</h1>.
You should read this page: Semantic Web. This is really about adding semantics to your data.
I see that (even) Ian Hickson/the working draft for Web Applications 1.0 is in doubt about the b- and u-elements. Or? And what about the i-elemnent? It seems to have gotten «more semantic»...