Re: [increasingly OT--but it's Saturday night] Re: Unicode HTML, download

From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Sun Nov 21 2004 - 16:39:09 CST

  • Next message: Philippe Verdy: "Re: Ezra"

    From: "E. Keown" <k_isoetc@yahoo.com>
    > Dear Doug Ewell, fantasai and List:
    >
    > I will try to sort out these diverse pieces of advice.
    >
    > What's the point, really, of going far beyond, even
    > beyond CSS, into XHTML, where few computational
    > Hebraists have gone before?

    You're right Helen, the web is full of non XHTML conforming documents. You
    probably don't need full XHTML conformance too, but having your document
    respect the XML nesting and closure of elements is certainly a must today,
    because it avoids most interoperability problems in browsers.

    So: make sure all your HTML elements and attributes are lowercase, and close
    ALL elements (even empty elements that should be closed by " />" instead of
    just ">", for example <br /> instead of <br>, and even <li>...</li>, or
    <p>...</p>).
    And then don't embed structural block elements
        (like <p>...</p> or <div>..</div> or <blockquote>...</blockquote>
        or <li>...</li> or <table>...</table>)
    within inline elements
        (like <b>...</b> or <font>...</font> or ...
        or <span>...</span>)
    Note that most inline elements are related to style, and they better fit
    outside of the body by assigning style classes to the structural elements
    (most of them are block elements).

    XHTML has deprecated most inline style elements, in favor of external
    specification of style through the class property added to structural block
    elements. XHTML has an excellent interoperability with a wider range of
    browsers, including old ones, except for the effective rendering of some CSS
    styles.

    The cost to convert an HTML file to full XML well-formedness is minor for
    you, but this allows you to use XML editors to make sure the document is
    properly nested, a pre-condition that will greatly help its interoperable
    interpretation.

    If you have FrontPage XP or 2003, you can use its "apply XML formatting
    rules" option to make this job nearly automatically, and make sure that all
    elements are properly nested and closed.

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