Please don't let me be misunderstood
There’s a magazine called "Cre@teOnline" which bills itself as "The Web Designer’s Bible".
Time for some bible bashing.
This month’s issue is dedicated to web browsers and standards. Great! You can never have too much discussion about this kind of stuff.
Needless to say, Jeffrey Zeldman is interviewed. Unfortunately, the journalist who did the interviewing didn’t bother to actually listen to him.
This is a direct quote from the article:
"Zeldman manages to cut down on the work needed to accommodate the browsers by using XHTML. This technology is a form of XML metalanguage (for a full description, see issue 20) which browsers perceive as HTML. This is particularly useful, because it enables different style sheets to be included in XHTML documents, which correspond to different proprietary requirements in different browsers.
"At www.zeldman.com, the layout of the page is done in HTML 4.0," explains Zeldman. "There is a style sheet for all browsers, including IE3 and Netscape 4." Zeldman can use the different style sheets defined in the XHTML document to provide tailored content to specific browsers."
Whaaat?!?!?
There’s Jeffrey Zeldman patiently explaining that his site is coded in HTML 4.0 and yet the journalist continues to talk about XHTML (which he has somehow mixed up with CSS).
For the record, a web page coded in XHTML is like a web page coded with any other DOCTYPE. It is simply HTML respecified as XML. It does not have any magical, browser sniffing powers.
*sigh*
What’s sad is to think that there might be web designers out there who want to learn more about XHTML and CSS. This article will only confuse them.
By the way, don’t bother going to Cre@teOnline’s website if you use a Mac: it throws up JavaScript errors all over the place.
But you can get to a website with a very similar domain name.