I was playing around with the basic analytics from builtwith.com and it noted that on one of my client sites I’m using HTML 4.0 transitional. That’s true. When I shifted from Freeway Pro 4 to Pro 5 earlier this year, it never occurred to me to change to XHTML 1.0 transitional, which I gather is far preferred these days.
Can I do that now by merely going into document setup and changing the output prefs, then hitting republish? Or is there some way I need to do this on a page-by-page basis?
Finally, assuming this is all possible, will making that change mess up anything on the site?
There’s nothing more or less valid about XHTML. In fact, there’s a school of thought that says XHTML is less valid than HTML unless you serve it with an XML doctype and declaration. The reason noone does this is that Explorer displays a blank screen when you do that.
The important thing (and Freeway does this for you automatically) is that you serve up a page that is valid for your doctype.
Thanks, Walter. That helps to know. I suspect I sometimes worry endlessly about things that ultimately matter very little, when all I really want to do is create decent web designs and know that Freeway is truly handling the dirty work of valid coding.
The whole thing is maddening. HTML5. XHTML5. Working groups disbanded. Work taken over by other groups. Browser developers refusing to use proposed standards because of alleged security concerns. An apparently endless discord.
The World Wide Web is like the transportation industry in 1900. Steam engines, gasoline engines, electric trams; horses and oxen; bicycles and shanks mare. A cacophony of choices and no real “standards” at all.
Some of this stuff may matter immensely, in terms of getting sites to actually reliably work for all my visitors. But it’s a mystery to me! Except that unless some client is going to make me ultra rich, I’m doing my best to stay off the bleeding edge.
There’s a lot of industry momentum behind HTML 5 for the purposes of making Web Applications. The whole business with how you view movies is really for the punters. The serious business case is being able to have a SQLite database on the browser, persist stuff to it, work on and off line without worrying about losing anything. It’s being able to push more and more of the work off to the browser, so your application doesn’t have to push so much data back and forth between the server and the browser. There’s a lot of goodness in there that has nothing to do with the eye candy.
I have no idea if Softpress are working on an HTML5 module for Freeway, but at its base, it’s such a light rewrite from XHTML 1.0 that I would imagine they are going to do it.
Where it gets interesting is when you start using some of the new tags, like header or footer or figure – there’s some real-world utility in those new object types. (See list here: http://www.w3schools.com/html5/html5_reference.asp)
This would be something that could be addressed in an Action at first, and then expand into the core.
The new audio and video controls are a natural, too, since they can be handled in an Action just like the FLV player works at the moment.
The geekier database stuff I doubt would make it into Freeway, simply because they rely on making a full application, with server-resident logic and so forth, and that’s just not an area that Softpress has traditionally addressed.
Rats! Looks like the a href is already deprecated. But I’ve been mooching around, looking at event attributes and the like.
I can appreciate the attempt to include more, what I’ll call tasks, in the published standards for browsers. And your enthusiasm for what those tasks could potentially do.
But I have to admit, it just reminds me of . I’m an old curmudgeon, and can’t help thinking that any standards, even though they open up new possibilities for presenting information in new ways, will always remain a moving target.
Given that all browser writers have the freedom to include or not, to create implementations that may differ–MSIE adding margins?–I really can’t get enthused as are you about a new set of–ahem–standards, as such.
As possibilities, yes, bring’em on. But as reliable implementations? Not in my lifetime!
Have a look here for some ideas why it’s a Good Thing™:
Walter
On May 11, 2010, at 7:29 PM, Bucky Edgett wrote:
Rats! Looks like the a href is already deprecated. But I’ve been
mooching around, looking at event attributes and the like.
I can appreciate the attempt to include more, what I’ll call tasks,
in the published standards for browsers. And your enthusiasm for
what those tasks could potentially do.
But I have to admit, it just reminds me of . I’m an old
curmudgeon, and can’t help thinking that any standards, even though
they open up new possibilities for presenting information in new
ways, will always remain a moving target.
Given that all browser writers have the freedom to include or not,
to create implementations that may differ–MSIE adding margins?–I
really can’t get enthused as are you about a new set of–ahem–
standards, as such.
As possibilities, yes, bring’em on. But as reliable implementations?
Not in my lifetime!