[TYPO3-dev] RFC: Change roadmap for 4.5 and 5.0

[Michael Scharkow]

Hi Christopher, I remember we've had this discussion before, but 
nonetheless...

Christopher wrote:
> XHTML is the future, sure, but it is NOT the NOW. As I've said before,
> HTML 4.01 is a CURRENT standard, and should be supported--all the more
> so since virtually _nobody_ actually uses XHTML in a way that browsers
> understand differently than 'tag soup' html anyway [1]. There is also
> no real danger that developers are going to start xhtml as xhtml in
> any widespread way in the near future since IE 7 will apparently not
> understand it (and obviously, no earlier version of IE does either...)

IE6 understands XHTML perfectly well, only it *renders* stuff in a bad 
way, but this goes as well for HTML4. Apart from the XML prologue bug I 
see no real issues with XHTML and IE, neither do around 99 percent of 
all the CSS/HTML gurus I've heard of.

I don't deny that HTML 4.0 is a current standard (btw. what would be an 
indication of it being deprecated then?), but I don't see any 
*practical* relevance for supporting it. How many sites have you seen 
recently that *required* HTML 4 in favour of XHTML? And vice versa? See 
my point?

> 5.0 is, IMO, a great opportunity to get ALL the html out of the
> core--including doctypes, closing slashes, and anything else. I can't
> see any reason why a CMS should prefer one current, working, valid and
> extremely widely supported html standard over another.

Because a CMS is built by developers who need to take decisions. And if 
I have the choice between supporting HTML 4 with *loads* of alley-oops 
in tslib, or concentrate on XHTML which around 99% of all users will be 
very happy to use.

While I'd prefer a simple *and* performant way to switch *all* output 
from X to HTML, I don't see one. And in this situation I'd prefer to 
only support XHTML in core.

Cheers,
Michael