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

[Christopher]

Hi,

On 4/10/06, Michael Scharkow <mscharkow at gmx.net> wrote:
> 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.

IE 6 (unless you employ a workaround using xsl or http header
jiggery-pokery) will not render xhtml AT ALL when it's served as
application/xhtml+xml.

> I don't deny that HTML 4.0 is a current standard (btw. what would be an
> indication of it being deprecated then?),

HTML 4.0 is NOT a current standard--HTML 4.01 is.

> 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?

The point is exactly opposite: if you're not serving xhtml as
application/xhtml+xml, there is no *practical* benefit to the use of
xhtml. Browsers just think it's html anyway, and html 4.01 can be as
strictly checked for syntatical correctness.

> > 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.

But a CMS is also _used_ by developers who need to take decisions.

I'm honestly bewildered by the claim that it's difficult to switch
between xhtml and html in code generation: given that TYPO3, when it
outputs markup at all, is not checking for validity or
well-formedness, the entire extent of the problem is limited to
doctypes, the decision to include--or not--closing tags on 'empty'
elements, and differences in attributes (e.g. target and border). If a
doctype is set using ' config.doctype = ___ ' then a simple check
seems to be all that's needed when outputting closing slashes and
attributes. And there are only a few elements where even _this_ would
be needed (meta, img, br, base...)

Realistically it's a very straightforward problem--the number of
differences between html and xhtml can be precisely stated.

-Christopher