James G Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >................ > For many applications, you are correct. However, some situations > require support of the most basic systems. > > Part of the problem with XHTML is that it is a page description > language instead of a semantic markup language. We need to be able > to support both screen displays as well as handhelds, phones, etc., > that might not be able to use all the stuff we want in the richer > screen media. Part of the other problem is that people writing with > XHTML will try to make the page appear as they want instead of > letting the stylesheet do it for them -- all the management in the > world can't change government workers. > > The other thing I was trying to avoid was drastic changes in markup > when there hasn't been a significant change in the semantics. Forms > come to mind for this. XHTML form elements are too closely tied to > presentation and not closely enough to the semantics. > .....................
I am slowly moving my applications to XHTML. I did meet difficulties where a simply template tag in TT, H:T and Mason would be very hard to implement in XHTML. For example, the HTML form tags. Even <input...> would not be easy, not to mention <select...> --- just as in your exmaple. But finally, it looks I can always found a solution when I learned more about it. On the other hand, all these difficulties we are talking about exist in Java servlet too. My personal experience is that XHTML provides a larger set of variation than H:T, but less than TT. I understand that most existing applications need not be moved to XHTM --- which will be a huge job and the benifit gained would be little --- and my own major applications are still on top of H:T. But I like to experience a little more new things. Since we are here talking about PR of mod_perl, I'd like to propose the idea and to get you people's ideas. >We also can't depend on customers having modern browsers (and >sometimes fear that they do, in the case of IE 6). We have customers >all over the globe that must be able to manage their account >information. This also means that we don't use any scripting except >to make things easier -- everything has to work without scripting on >the client side. This is correct. But again, I think this could also be a reason why we prepare our page in two set of data: a XHTML template and dynamically-generated XML data. We can serve more XML based clients in the future. Pod Merl -- Report problems: http://perl.apache.org/bugs/ Mail list info: http://perl.apache.org/maillist/modperl.html List etiquette: http://perl.apache.org/maillist/email-etiquette.html
