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@bq
Almost everything on that page is total and utter horseshit.
I have been doing this for a living for 12 years, and experience has taught me that xhtml 1.0, with the correct doctype (transitional in the case of this forum because we need the target attribute on links in posts) and proper, lean, semantic HTML is actually the best way to guarantee that all browsers render your documents as similarly and as standards compliant as possible. User agents when given the correct doctype actually switch rendering modes to a standards compliant one. It's also a mature standard and all issues with those renderers have long since been documented, along with any workarounds. Its maturity also puts the onus on browser makers to support our code, rather than for us to support their quirks. The very high level of detail in the XHTML standards also ensures that it is future proof. The issue about PCDATA script and style tag content is irrelevant because if I design the code we will not be putting any inline script or style tags in at all. All CSS and JS belongs in external files, which can be separately cached for much longer intervals. Incorrect xml grammar in forum posts is irrelevant because the forum does not allow people to put HTML in - just BBCode, and the (x)HTML generated is up to us.
I'd love to have a play with HTML5, but I don't think this is the right project to do it. It's just an internet forum. Simpler is better and less is more. And anything less than comprehensive browser support is unacceptable. Tried and trusted is the way to go. So much time and effort will go to fixing errors caused by unfinalised specs incomplete browser support, and so forth, that any benefits are outweighed by the problems.