Marky Markup

Earlier in the week Mark Pilgrim chucked a hissy, and, based on his dislike for the direction that the in progress xhtml 2.0 spec is heading, decided to change his site from being cutting edge xhtml 1.1 to plain old dependable html 4.

He was specifically unhappy with the exclusion or ommision of the <cite> tag from the spec (now pretty much seen as an oversight), and more generally with the magnitute of changes from html and xhtml 1, including the replacement of the <img> tag and other common elements. As you may know if you read diveintomark.org, Mark had earlier repurposed the <cite> tag to provide a mechanism for organising his posts based on citations to individuals. (Personally, while I think this was an interesting exercise, I don’t think it alone merits the retention of a seldom-used tag; Sam Ruby managed to quickly replicate Mark’s efforts without using the cite tag at all.)

Once he had reverted to html 4, Mark found that he had browser compatibility issues and has now resorted to dishing up browser-specific code. Never mind that he is now engaging in the same tiresome process that web developers have had to put up with for years in order to create sites that looked the same in all browsers; some were quick to praise the ‘elegance’ of his solution. I don’t doubt that if Mark decided to revert to html 3.2 that there would be some who would find his use of tables and invisible gifs to position content ‘intriguing’ and ‘revolutionary.’

Smart alec-ry aside, the one very tangible benefit that xhtml has over html is a tighter adherence to official standards by browser makers. As more site developers and programmers adhere to standards, browser makers pay more attention to them, and everyone benefits. This effect snowballs as high profile sites follow the lead set by others and convert their sites to valid xhtml and css. (As an aside, I think the adoption of tableless xhtml and css has been responsible for the emergence of a new design aesthetic on the web.) One need only witness the speed with which the safari developers responded to Mark’s criticism of their engine’s rendering of his site to see the influence that he wields in this area. So in that sense, it’s slightly disappointing to see him turn his focus away from this area, because as I see it, the focus on standards is finally now beginning to pay off. As he suggests, I’ll ‘expect less’.

Additional reading:

Jeffery Zeldman on xhtml

Sjoerd Visscher’s weblog, now xhtml 2 compliant

beandizzy shows how to extend the xhtml 2 namespace

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