Re: Web headers

[Zack Weinberg <zack at codesourcery dot com>]

On Mon, Jan 14, 2002 at 03:49:23PM -0800, Joe Buck wrote:
> > Browsers seem to be happy with XHTML <tag />
> > notation in a document marked as plain HTML, but they may not accept
> > the other way around.
> 
> The space between the tag and the / is what makes the backward
> compatibility work: the older browsers just ignore the / as an
> unknown pseudo-attribute.  XML would allow the writing of <tag/>.

Yah.  My point is that switching style.mhtml to an XHTML DTD might
make some browsers object to the pre-XHTML markup which still appears
on some of the webpages.

> > [myself, I'd be quite happy to see us go whole hog for strict XHTML
> > and style sheeting.]
> 
> This, on the other hand, is more likely to cause problems: if all of the
> style is in the style sheet, that's more likely to cause problems for
> Netscape 4.x.  I would recommend only going for "XHMTL 1.0 Transitional".

Observationally speaking, the _only_ thing on most of the webpages
that isn't strict XHTML (after cleanup) is the <h1 align="center">
tag.  Convert that to <h1 style="text-align: center"> or whatever the
CSS is, and the effect will be that some browsers don't center the H1
content.  No great loss.

I've been playing with CSS for more serious layout (replacing tables
with it) on my own webpages.  I don't think the audience is ready for
us to do that to GCC's webpages - but the only page that has tabled
layout is index.html; there are other uses of <table> in our webpages
but they're all real tables.  Okay, search.html is arguable.

zw