
HTML or XHTML: Does It Really Matter? - ajbatac
http://www.sitepoint.com/article/html-or-xhtml-does-it-matter
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chrisbroadfoot
Only use XHTML when you need to have your content parsed as XML. Otherwise,
there is nothing wrong at all with well-formed HTML.

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aaronblohowiak
the opposite should be your strategy because XHTML is more easily machine
read, and thus more easily repurposed (and therefore, a more powerful
storage/interchange format). use XHTML so your content can be parsed as XML
unless you have a specific and clear reason to abandon easy machine
readability.

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simonw
Tools like BeautifulSoup (Python) and hpricot (Ruby) make processing HTML just
as easy as processing XML.

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juanpablo
"For an invalid XML document, browsers did not even make an attempt to parse
the document as best they could, as they would with HTML—instead, they just
displayed a validation error and stopped".

Yes that _is_ the idea: Force developers to write valid code.

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bdt
Why force them?

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aaronblohowiak
the alternative is that people become reliant, then, on the implementations
guess as to what the person meant. in order to still call such a thing a
standard, you'd also have to standardize the guesswork involved in correcting
people's mistakes. this would lead to a very large and cumbersome "standard"
that violates principals of minimalism and least power. that being said, you
can bet your bottom dollar that programs like "tidy" are really useful
sometimes =D

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newt0311
"XHTML is still worth using, because it’s a transitional standard that moves
us towards a pure-XML Web. XML is inherently better than SGML, because it’s
simpler and stricter, and much easier to parse (once you’ve understood its
rules)."

This is where I have a problem. In my experience, one can either have a format
designed for computers or humans. XML is badly designed for both. Humans don't
like it for its unnecessary strictness (unnecessary because SGML can be parsed
in a decidable fashion) and computers don't like it because of all the
extraneous characters. Where does that leave XML?

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axod
It leaves XML as a dead duck. Sure legacy things will use it, and corporations
will probably still love it, but it's had its day thank god.

