2002-06-13 16:08 UTC Buzz: One shot stuns, two shots kill
Simon Willison suggests that I may have been too rough on the WaSP:
Some of his points seem overly picky [...] I would not consider any of them to significantly dilute WaSP's message.
The message may not be diluted... I simply think it is very bad form for a group that is claiming to champion the standards to be making any mistakes at all on their site.
I checked a site Hixie mentions as sending the correct text/xml content-type header in NS4 and, as I suspected, NS4 popped up a "download" box and failed to render the page.
Which is correct behaviour, since Netscape releases prior to 6.0 didn't support XML. In fact, IE doesn't support XML either (check the site and see if it looks like a web page to you). This is why using XHTML at this time is inappropriate! You don't see people writing Web pages using XLink, or MathML, or SVG, and there is a good reason for that: Web browsers don't yet support those specs! So why do people insist on using the equally unsupported XHTML? (Of course the question Tantek would have us ask is "Why are those specs not still in CR?".)
I also checked out the W3's XHTML home page - XHTML1.0 strict and a content-type header of text/html.
The W3C site is a terrible example of good standards compliance. They have trailing vertical bars in their <link> element titles, they abuse the <address> element, and worst of all, they use a table for layout purposes.