This blog recently started serving the right content type according to capability of the user agent (browser and so). Considering that I understand the purpose and the benefits behind the technologies, this is quite late. It is not that I had ignored it. On the other hand I never stopped thinking about it and contemplating what to do. Today XHTML is a technology that makes the user think a lot for embracing it.
I had tried to find out about selecting HTML or XHTML, and why there was no urgency towards serving the recommended content type. It is not very easy to find websites where this is done successfully. One popular reason is very clearly explained by Ajay. Shelley Powers points out that it is important to educate the experts about benefits of the technology behind this.
I think it is someone else who is responsible - by whom the masses go. The browsers that do not support the right content types, the advertising companies that do not provide the right javascript, the tools that do not create valid XHTML - all these are responsible. An average user hardly has any technology motives behind starting a website. It is more business oriented like earning through advertising, getting an audience or getting an online presence. Valid XHTML and serving the appropriate content type are not easy, in fact they create more than a couple of hurdles, require more effort and start getting obtrusive. Unless the entities that provide the tools for Web operations do not support XHTML completely, it is going to be poised against the users.
The average user will always find supporting XHTML against his/her business sense and it will always end up on the losing side in the cost-benefit analysis. Not that one has to support it, the X/HTML 5 is a perfectly valid path to go by, but if XHTML has to be anything near usable, it is the entities that the users interact with will have to be educated. Sam Ruby feels that more knowledge to the end users might help. I feel that what will motivate the validity and correctness is not technology itself, but the tangible that the users will get out of it. Today there are more problems to solve than benefits to gain and the technology creates more hurdles for users than enabling them, and XHTML is more against the users than with them.
March 12th, 2007 at 6:22 am
Good point. To the average end user, the technology is so transparent, that one wouldn’t notice the difference between broken HTML and valid XHTML. Browsers are build for handling faults.
April 29th, 2007 at 9:40 pm
[...] Frankly, at the first instance, I do not like it. Forgiveness implies ignoring the errors, the errors that come out of not doing something right. And that not something right will keep haunting, will keep hindering further development. The part that I do agree with is to not let the error be all over the application. There should be a way to handle the error gracefully, and give better options to the user rather than show the error directly. The draconian handling with XHTML is one of the reasons I think it has been posed against the users’ interest. [...]