Keith Devens .com

Web specifications have become too complex

I think web specifications have become too complex. I'm trying, really I am, to conform to XHTML 1.1 (why? just because). I've pretty much concluded that this is just all too complex and time-consuming for any but the most supremely anal-retentive people with nearly unlimited free time to be certain that their page conforms to all the relevant specifications. The W3C's validator doesn't even check if the Content-type returned by an XHTML 1.x page is 'application/xhtml+xml', which has a "SHOULD" level of necessity in the spec.

Besides content types, there are character encodings, which have to be specified in two or three places (and then the actual encoding of the page content has to be correct), and the language of a page, which can be specified in a few different ways, and I'm not yet certain which way is the correct one. Plus, it's actually fairly hard to edit pages by hand and be sure that they're valid XHTML 1.1.

What a mess.

Permalink | Comments? | id 4902

04:01 (utc-4)
edited: 04:04 (utc-4)