XHTML

Make Interchange include a space and a slash (" /"), before the trailing ">", in all of the standalone HTML tags it generates.

Synopsis

This is a Yes or No directive.  The default is No (of course).

Scope

This directive is available for use globally (in the "interchange.cfg" configuration file), and locally (in the "catalog.cfg" configuration file).

The global configuration affects all websites running under the Interchange instance.  Each individual website's local configuration will not affect or influence other websites in any way. 

Description

XHTML is a pointless standard that 70% or more of the world's installed browsers (MSIE and various others) don't support anyway.  You may or may not know that MSIE didn't have an XHTML parser at all until version 7, and treated XHTML as HTML 4 "tag soup".  MSIE version 7 has an XHTML parser, but is always installed with it switched off by default.

To make matters worse, the clowns at the W3C seem to think it'd be great if they could get away with making XHTML 2.0 break backward compatibility with all previous versions.  In effect, the W3C are busy creating yet another a brand new markup language for browser development teams to ignore.

In spite of all of the glaringly obvious downsides, there are a handful of fanatical XHTML flag-wavers out there who want Interchange to spit out XHTML-style markup before the standard starts to show even the tiniest hint of usefulness.  This directive should be considered nothing more than an attempt to keep the XHTML trolls quiet.  If this directive is enabled, Interchange will simply insert a space and a slash (" /"), before the trailing ">", in all of the standalone HTML tags generated by the Interchange core.  I'm sure the lunatics won't notice that it's not really XHTML.  Hell, they probably haven't even noticed that most web users use a browser that doesn't support XHTML.

Warning This directive will only affect markup code generated by the Interchange core and its standard set of tags.  The generation of true XHTML-compliant pages is left to those who find that they have nothing better to do with their life, and don't care about the fact that XHTML 2.0, once finalised, will force them to start all over again.

Some misguided individuals seem to think that making HTML pages XHTML-compliant is extremely easy, and only requires that you lowercase argument names, quote argument options and include a "/" before each standalone tag's ending ">".  There's a lot more to it than that, of course.  This page  lists some of problems you'll face, along with some of the XHTML myths you might have heard.

HTML 4.01 contains everything that XHTML 1.0 contains, so there's very little reason to use XHTML in the real world.  It appears the main reason is simply "jumping on the bandwagon" of using the latest and (perceived) greatest thing.