Day: July 15, 2009

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To XHTML or not to XHTML?

Today, we had a conversation about HTML 4 vs XHTML 1.0. For me, the matter was neatly settled they very first time I saw an XML system produce XHTML like this:

  
An article with an  empty emphasis tag.

Perfectly legal XML, perfectly legal XHTML. But — if you serve up this XHTML as text/html (which 99.99% of the world does), then you end up with this:

Empty tags considered harmful

Why? Because it’s parsed as HTML. And the browser sees the start of an em tag, but no close.

And now I make sure that all our sites emit HTML 4. It’s a lot simpler.

This isn’t to say I don’t use XHTML. It’s a fine medium for further processing (e.g. applying XSLT). But it’s not right for serving up to browsers verbatim.

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Using a Java 6 based Eclipse with Cocoa

This is somewhat niche, but I’m going to post it anyway in case it helps somebody else…

I recently saw a problem with Eclipse and m2eclipse. When I tried to import a Java 6 based project, I got an error in the maven console.

Failure executing javac, but could not parse the error:
javac: invalid target release: 1.6
Usage: javac  
where possible options include:
 -g                         Generate all debugging info
 -g:none                    Generate no debugging info
 -g:{lines,vars,source}     Generate only some debugging info
 -nowarn                    Generate no warnings
 -verbose                   Output messages about what the compiler is doing

This is happening because m2eclipse is trying to run the compiler from within the same JVM that Eclipse is running. And by the eclipse.org downloads only offer Carbon and Cocoa options. Both of these are 32 bit. Which means they’ll only ever run using Java 5, even if you’ve got Java 6 installed (unlike my iMac G5, grumble, grumble).

Thankfully, the 64 cocoa version is available, though it’s only the old “Eclipse SDK” download. But ekke wrote up [galileo] EPP for Cocoa 64-bit, which shows how to go about getting (effectively) the same setup as the eclipse.org downloads.

If you follow along that procedure, you get an eclipse that works well with m2eclipse and Java 6 project. As a bonus, it feels quicker to me.

Hopefully future versions of Eclipse will offer a 64-bit cocoa download.