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After writing XHTML for several years (giving it a full-faith attempt) I never understood the point. You keep repeating "semantically sound" but I can't fathom

After writing XHTML for several years (giving it a full-faith attempt) I never understood the point. You keep repeating "semantically sound" but I can't fathom what that means in your context. I never saw any indication that XHTML brought significant practical semantic information or standardization over what HTML5 can do. It did add significant gratuitous verbosity that made XHTML documents much harder to read and edit.

boomlinde 7y ago
> You keep repeating "semantically sound" but I can't fathom what that means in your context. Documents built on the principle that their structure should relate to the meaning of their content rather than its presentation are what I consider "semantically sound". By negative example, an HTML document filled with div pyramids just to apply layout information, and obtuse class and id names are not what I consider semantically sound. However clumsy it was in practice, XHTML and CSS sought to address this by making the markup extensible and moving style information out of the document. > I never saw any indication that XHTML brought significant practical semantic information or standardization over what HTML5 can do. Obviously HTML5 had the advantage of hindsight and the perspective to learn from some of the mistakes of XHTML while adopting some of its more useful qualities. I should also note that I'm discussing the point of XHTML, not trying to tell anyone that it was particularly successful to that end. Don't confuse the two.
- eridius 7y ago
  One of the interesting things you could do with XHTML was ditch the HTML entirely and write an XML document expressing the semantic content, and then couple that with an XSLT stylesheet to convert it into XHTML for display. This way the exact same resource could be read by machines to get the semantic content, and then read by browsers and transformed into the display content. I'm not sure if anyone ever actually used this seriously though. Definitely very "ivory tower" design. But in the abstract it's a cool idea.
  - spiralx 7y ago
    I wrote an XSLT stylesheet that could turn an XHTML document into a display of its own source, complete with indenting, code folding and syntax highlighting. I was quite pleased with that :) When I worked at the BMJ all of our content was stored as XML and rendered to the browser using XSLT, although this was done on the back-end and the resulting XHTML embedded in our various Spring applications. This sort of thing is probably the most common use of XHTML today...

boomlinde 7y ago

> You keep repeating "semantically sound" but I can't fathom what that means in your context. Documents built on the principle that their structure should relate to the meaning of their content rather than its presentation are what I consider "semantically sound". By negative example, an HTML document filled with div pyramids just to apply layout information, and obtuse class and id names are not what I consider semantically sound. However clumsy it was in practice, XHTML and CSS sought to address this by making the markup extensible and moving style information out of the document. > I never saw any indication that XHTML brought significant practical semantic information or standardization over what HTML5 can do. Obviously HTML5 had the advantage of hindsight and the perspective to learn from some of the mistakes of XHTML while adopting some of its more useful qualities. I should also note that I'm discussing the point of XHTML, not trying to tell anyone that it was particularly successful to that end. Don't confuse the two.

eridius 7y ago
One of the interesting things you could do with XHTML was ditch the HTML entirely and write an XML document expressing the semantic content, and then couple that with an XSLT stylesheet to convert it into XHTML for display. This way the exact same resource could be read by machines to get the semantic content, and then read by browsers and transformed into the display content. I'm not sure if anyone ever actually used this seriously though. Definitely very "ivory tower" design. But in the abstract it's a cool idea.
- spiralx 7y ago
  I wrote an XSLT stylesheet that could turn an XHTML document into a display of its own source, complete with indenting, code folding and syntax highlighting. I was quite pleased with that :) When I worked at the BMJ all of our content was stored as XML and rendered to the browser using XSLT, although this was done on the back-end and the resulting XHTML embedded in our various Spring applications. This sort of thing is probably the most common use of XHTML today...