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To: Ceri Davies <setantae@submonkey.net>
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From: swear@attbi.com (Gary W. Swearingen)
Date: 05 Apr 2003 11:51:58 -0800
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cc: Tom Rhodes <trhodes@FreeBSD.org>
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Subject: Re: XHTML and the website
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Ceri Davies <setantae@submonkey.net> writes:

> I just want to get some consensus before I start making sweeping changes
> to the tree, plus I could do with a bit of input on whether I'm doing this
> The Right Way.

You seem to be talking about a higher-level Right Way than the following,
but I thought I'd mention it for those who don't already know about it.

http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/#guidelines  is titled
"HTML Compatibility Guidelines" and it begins with
"This appendix summarizes design guidelines for authors who wish their
XHTML documents to render on existing HTML user agents."
I wrote these notes while reading it about a year ago:

--  use both the encoding attribute specification on the
       xml declaration (e.g. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="EUC-JP"?>) and a meta http-equiv
       statement (e.g. <meta http-equiv="Content-type" content='text/html;
       charset="EUC-JP"' />). The value of the encoding attribute of the xml processing instruction
       takes precedence.
--  Always use "&amp;" for "&", esp. in attr. vals.
--  Use <br />, not <br/> and same for other empty elements.
--  Use <p> </p>, not <p /> and same for other usually non-empty elements.
--  Avoid line breaks and wider-than-one-char whitespace in attr. vals.
--  Use both "lang" and xml:lang attr in elements (probably just in head & body (or html)).
--  Use seemingly redundant <a id="foo" name="foo">...</a>
--  Use lower case in tags.