Now before i start let me just say i dont beleive in religion and i don’t beleive in the athiests views i have my own personal beleifs that i have just now discovered.

I was at a party one night when i was confronted with an athiest we got to talking about my religion and as i joke i told him i was an “Agnostic Theist Athiest” and when he questioned me on this i told him i dont wholly beleive in a christian god and sometimes when the mood takes me i don’t beleive in a god at all. He asked me why and i could not answer him, he told me my problem was i had a lack of faith and i couldn’t see the truth, nothing happens after we die. I reject this idea, i personally am terrified of death but not because of nothingness after we die its something diffrent it’s the thought of this life as being pointless. If we were solely created to live then why not just give us some basic survival skills and send us out into the world, why ponder, why create. Art is meaningless to our existence why create it then? Love is meaningless, why love, we don’t need to love to mate so why? for awhile i have despaired at these questions as it makes my existence here meaningless, as it makes all of our’s pointless and i just can’t buy it. So i beleive that there is a god to some degree i beleive we were created theres just far too much evidence not to agree. Imagine nothingness, most people think of a terrible blackness but the truth is nothingness is much less than that and imagine that’s at one point all our universe was. What created the first thing? people theorise it was a “Big Bang” but then what created this big bang? again something cant just come from nothing, its impossible.

Look at free will, conciousness, personality, spirituality. We are an inquisitive species by nature but why? what’s the point if there truly is nothing out there? i reject that notion whole heartidly, Ill never know if there is a creator but to me it makes sense. To me it gives some comfort.

I really still am confused in what i beleive and being 22 i thought i was too young to really worry about it to the point i thought something was wrong with me. It is very comforting to see people even younger than me question there morality. Truly though don’t ever be scared of death, no one can ever say what happens after we die, science tells us nothing but science has been wrong before it’s based alot on beleif a narrow beleif that all we see is all we have. Look around your world and never be afraid to question what is and why it is. If we all sit around waiting on the inevitable then on our deathbed we will look back at this time as wasted, live it and love it and be sure to squeeze every single minute of pleasure out of our lives theres nothing wrong with being afraid, but don’t let that fear rule your life. I had so much more to say on this subject but i don’t want to get all preachy. Remeber though is all else fails just think of life as being in the doctors waiting room when your sure theres bad news to be told. You can sit around fidgiting and waiting for that door to open or you can kick back, open a magazine and enjoy the wait. Who knows maybe when it’s all said and done there will have been nothing to worry about the whole time.

Thanks for your thoughts, I was evaluating to convert to XHTML, and you helped me making my decision

Stick to HTML.

Yes, this discussion never seems to go out of fashion. I wrote another post later on, HTML or XHTML?, that also might be of interest to you.

Sounds like a valid reason, if you want to put it through an XSLT. When it comes to ASP.NET and valid code, you can read my post How to generate valid XHTML with .NET.

No problem at all (at least not to me).
But thanks for trying to keep it at a reasonable level and as a balanced discussion, instead of flaming away.

I really appreciate serious discussions.

In re-reading my previous post I see that in my haste my comments could be inflamatory on a number of levels and to a plethora of people, so here are my apologies and restatements in a more civil manner.

First of all, I’ll retract my “no one’s mentioned this” claim. This concept WAS mentioned amongst the many people participating, pauldwaite most notably. He raised the point that XHTML pages are easier to deal with. I simply added an example of an internet app that takes advantage of XML now and applied it to XHTML sites in general.

Next, my final statement in the previous post could be interpreted as insulting to many individuals and I extend my most sincere apologies to anyone who may have interpreted my statement as an insult to any individual or collective peoples. If I could amend my final statement it would read…

RSS seems to be an intermediate step towards an XHTML-prevalent internet.

Better late than never.
To me, I see much easier re-using and parsing of the code if it’s valid, well-formed XHTML.

However, the world throws us obstacles all the time, like WYSIWYG tools, “features” in .NET etc.

But at least we need to have the ambition and vision to do it right and not give in.

Aggregators could determine the XPATH into each site’s article nodes and directly extract new content without the intermediate RSS step (which of course, generates XML!) Alternatively, XHTML web sites could publish in META tags the XPATH needed to extract article content from that specific site.

RSS seems to be a crutch for the XHTML-challenged.

Sounds like a good ambition!
Preferably, one would like to convince the customer that opening a new window isn’t a necessity.

However, if that fails, the solution you’re striving for should be a good alternative. A new window for those who use web browsers that support/have JavaScript activated, and just linking to the correct page for those who don’t.

Nah, I’m talking solely on finding an alternative to target="_blank", one that works without requiring that attribute, and one I can parse in- and out of documents easily.

A javascript approach would have the only downside that if javascript is disabled, the link opens in the current window. The target="_blank"-approach has a much bigger downside, in that IE-users can’t really do anything easily to make it NOT open in a new window. So if you want that link to open in your current window, you need to manually copy the shortcut and paste it into your address bar. That’s an accessibility issue for the vast majority of people, namely everyone that uses Internet Explorer and can see.

So, to cut my irrelevant rant short(er :/), my idea will most likely be a very accessible approach that allows the use of XHTML Strict.

I should write an article about it once doing it, and see if ALA / Sitepoint care to publish it

I don’t know what the JavaScript-approach will consist of (like using the rel-attribute and an onload script?), but if you require JavaScript of the user, won’t you, most likely, get accessibility issues then?

Hah, thanks! I’d have come here earlier if I hadn’t been so ridiculously behind on my weblogs. See, my CMS isn’t entirely finished yet, and right now, virtually all my time is spent on finishing it. It’s annoying, because it’s keeping me from being very up to date every so often, but ohwell. Eventually I’ll catch up (and get something more worthwhile done with my site, *mutters at self*)

Yeah, the Almost Standards Mode-aspect isn’t great, but sadly I have no way of working around it. I’m looking into using a Javascript-approach to work around it so that I can make all the sites XHTML Strict, but for the time being that’s not finished yet (and also, lower priority than finishing the missing features on the CMS itself…).

Good to see you here!

I agree with what you said and think it sounds good.
The only thing I have a problem with (although I understand the issue) is using the Transitional Doctype because of its Almost Standards Mode rendering in Firefox.

I’m not interested in having a heated debate where people fight for their particular standpoint. How do we make these two camps meet? Is it even possible? I want to reach a middle-ground, what’s acceptable, where can we set the bar so it suits the majority?

I’m not sure whether it’ll really work, but it’s my effort anyway: proving that creating True XHTML websites even for businesses doesn’t have to be a problem, as long as you use content-negotiation to serve non-conforming browsers normal HTML (whether you switch your markup around to be truly HTML with an HTML doctype or not is up to you).

My CMS is doing just that. Ensured well-formed, valid XHTML documents (Transitional sadly because customers still demand to use target=”_blank”), sent as application/xhtml+xml to all browsers that support it, and sent as text/html to those that don’t.