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August 1

Status of XHTML 1.0

When I ask W3's "Markup Validation Service" to look at what I believe (and hope) is an error-free page of XHTML 1.0 strict, then (as long as I haven't made any goofy mistakes) it tells me "This document was successfully checked as XHTML 1.0 Strict!" (on a green background).

When I ask "Unicorn - W3C's Unified Validator" to look at the very same page, it reports two errors:

About <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>, it remonstrates:

<?xml version="1 
Saw “

About <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">, it remonstrates:

Obsolete doctype. Expected “”.

And I get a disapproving message as a summary (on a red background).

My understanding was that any W3C recommendation was just that; and as long as you assiduously followed it (preferably with the relevant doctype declaration), you'd be fine. (The only standard I've heard of is the stunningly unpopular ISO/IEC 15445:2000.)

Imaginably the name "Unicorn - W3C's Unified Validator" is shorthand for "Unicorn - W3C's Unified Validator for HTML5", and this assumes that anything it's asked to chew on is an attempt at HTML5. Or am I wrong, and W3C has disrecommended (?) XHTML 1.0 Strict? -- Hoary (talk) 03:13, 1 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, maybe I have it. Unicorn (described as a "validator") passes the (X)HTML-related task to Nu, which "is intended solely as a checker, not as a pass/fail certification mechanism"; so against somebody's ideas of HTML5, I suppose; not against a DTD. Calling Unicorn a "validator" seems odd. Nomenclature aside, I'm still wondering about the status of XHTML 1.0 (when used only as intended, of course.) -- Hoary (talk) 04:59, 1 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

It's sort of like DVD+R and DVD-R. Instead of deciding between these two formats the DVD drive manufacturers simply made every drive work with either, leaving the choice to the consumer. Likewise, every browser works wit HTML and XHTML. leaving the choice to the website owner.

BTW, HTML 5 is still evil:

I'm just saying. --Guy Macon (talk) 06:39, 1 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I discover that I'm seriously out of date. So these days web standards are being developed not by W3C but instead by "WHATWG", made up of (i) the commercial arm of a US nonprofit, and (ii)–(iv) three stupendously profitable US corporations. What could possibly go wrong? As for my hand-coded pages, I'm trying to remember why I had them start with "<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>"; I think that there might have been some browser (MSIE 6?) that would interpret a thus-headed page in "standards mode", but a not-thus-headed page in "legacy mode" or some such euphemism for pretending that the page was tag soup generated by MS Word or whatever. Meanwhile, the page DRM's Dead Canary: How We Just Lost the Web, What We Learned from It, and What We Need to Do Next -- thank you for the links, very interesting! -- appears to be in HTML5 and has some mind-boggling markup, notably "

<body class="html not-front not-logged-in page-node page-node- page-node-97197 node-type-blog long-read-share-links  i18n-en section-deeplinks no-secondary-nav right-sidebar">

". -- Hoary (talk) 08:17, 1 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I was using the w3 validator for some HTML 4.01 with inline CSS (*gasps*) the other day; i found that if i throw an HTML5 doctype on the top of it, the validator didn't return the 'obsolete doctype' error, and was 100% happy with the document. I don't know how similar the standards are as i'm still stuck in the past. Zindor (talk) 13:56, 1 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

You'll find that a lot less thought is put into web standards nowadays. Maybe not surprising given 90% of the market uses the same browser developed by the world's biggest online tracking company. 93.136.160.249 (talk) 04:02, 3 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]