Re: <OK> [Groff] Simplifying groff documentation

[Keith Marshall]

On Friday 05 January 2007 22:47, D. E. Evans wrote:
>    But xhtml-1.0+ *requires* that tags be represented in *lower*
>    case *only*, and any mixed or upper case representation is
>    (strictly) invalid.  AIUI, today's web authors really should be
>    striving towards xhtml standards compliance; in this respect,
>    grohtml's use of lower case is already well on the way.
>
> In theory, that's nice, but only a couple of web browsers, or other
> user agents, truly support XHTML.  Most sites, including W3C, that
> support XHTML use content negotiation, with redundant files
> (HTML and XHTML), or in some cases--following appendix C of XHTML
> 1.0--offer a symlink as .html to the .xhtml file.  (Mozilla and
> Amaya are the only major web browsers that have full support for
> XHTML.  The new lynx has some support.)  XHTML and HTML are not
> compatible, do not use the same MIME type, and only by relying on
> error correction can a XHTML file be sent as text/html and hope
> to be rendered in a usable way.  The moment you start using XML
> features in XHTML, it becomes unusable to an HTML parser.
>
> grohtml should stick with HTML 4 for the time being.

I'm not saying that I disagree with this.  What I *am* saying is that HTML-4 
allows tags to be expressed in lower, upper or mixed case, in a completely 
case insensitive manner, *without* violating the standard, whereas XHTML-1 
*absolutely* *requires* lower case.

Thus, by standardising on lower case, grohtml remains *fully* HTML-4 
conformant, while also retaining a degree of XHTML-1 readiness.  IMO, this is 
a sensible design decision, in preparation for a *possible* future move to 
support an emerging XHTML standard; meanwhile, grohtml can continue to 
generate valid HTML-4, *without* requiring it to sacrifice this level of 
XHTML-1 preparedness.

Regards,
Keith.