When Does XHTML Matter?

By Eric — — 5 minute read

I noticed the other day that the pages on this site had double body tags in the HTML. As someone who favors standards it was kind of embarrassing. But what started as a quick fix turned into a few days of ruminating about how I'm putting this site together.

I use FrontPage 2000 to write my articles. Then I run an Ant script that uses the HTML content of the site to build an RSS feed, a home page with recent articles, the archive page, a Google site map and finally run the content through an XSLT to apply the common page elements.

Since FrontPage 2000 doesn't output, or even tolerate XHTML, I use a custom Ant task, styler, that lets you do XSLT transformations on HTML pages, even when they aren't actually XML. My poorly formed result pages were the result of an XPath goof of selecting html/body when I should have done html/body/*.

But I started to take a look at the community technology preview of Microsoft's new Expression Web Designer, which is one of the successors of FrontPage. It supports XHTML, which might make me finally upgrade when it comes out. I wondered if I could replace a bunch of the stuff in my Ant script by just using Web Designer features.

The first interesting thing was Dynamic Web Templates, which are actually a FrontPage 2003 feature. They provide essentially the same functionality as my XSLT transformation -- centralizing all the common page elements into a single place. There were a couple of things that bothered me about the feature, though. First, every time you save the template page, it asks if you want to update all the pages that use it. I guess the idea is that you won't edit your template much once you get it right, but for habitually frequent savers like myself, it was a little annoying. Second, when doing real writing of content, Web Designer shows a dimmed template and provides you an editable area where the content ends up. Maybe I'm just quirky, but I'd rather compose articles in a pretty minimal layout. I don't really need my site banner and search side bar -- just give me a nice plain HTML editing surface, please, with a simple CSS for fonts. In fact, that's really how I'd prefer my articles to be anyway -- nice simple XHTML instead of being filled with automatically replicated layout tables and presentation-oriented div tags.

Next I decided to take a look at ASP.NET 2.0. I'm pretty ignorant of all versions of ASP, to be honest. But I worked on a web application before ASP 1.0 ever came out, building something that maybe would have been kind of like SharePoint had NextPage had a hundred times the resources that we did. We had to build our own presentation framework, and it suffered from neglect even when we started to learn some things about how to build web applications but had more pressing requirements.

In my foray into ASP.NET, I learned about master pages, which functionally overlap with Dynamic Web Templates but are in fact dynamic, whereas Dynamic Web Templates are, from a typical programmer point of view, static.

A master page has placeholders for content, like this:

... <body> <asp:contentplaceholder id="Body" runat="server"/> </body> ...

When creating the content to go in that placeholder, I initially thought I'd be able to create a nice XHTML page, sullied only slightly by some extra ASP tags to match up with the placeholders in the master document. That's not the case. The content page can only have the blocks of ASP tags:

OK, here is my body text.

If you have more than one placeholder in the master, you have the same number of top-level asp:Content tags in the content page. So what is this strange thing that I'm supposed to store my content in? It's not HTML -- you're not even allowed to have an <html> tag in the page. It's certainly not XML because there's no root element if there are multiple content blocks. So how are you supposed to author your content?

Of course you can author in plain text, writing markup by hand, but that seems kind of primitive. You can use Visual Studio, but that doesn't give you spell checking or a UI geared toward English composition. Finally there's Web Designer, but the rendering is messed up (but it's only a CTP after all) and it has the same "edit in full context" UI as Dynamic Web Templates. And what do you end up with when you're done authoring? Some non-standard text file.

People tend to agree that XHTML to the browser is a good thing, but isn't it a good thing for authoring, too? A variety of authoring tools exist, and it's so much easier to manipulate source material in XHTML. But master pages seem only concerned with good markup for the browser delivery portion of a document's lifecycle.

I'd like to learn ASP.NET better at some point -- I'm sure it's excellent for lots of things, but the master page system doesn't feel right to me. My XSLT approach feels better -- clean source documents combined with a "master page" that pulls in the appropriate content. The content pages don't have any special markup saying "this section will go into some other page at location X", they just have markup.

So I decided to stick with my current system, fixing the body problem and taking advantage of Web Designer and HTML Tidy to have XHTML sources and XHTML delivery. I'm content with it... for now, anyway.