You are reading a single comment by @pascalo and its replies.
Click here to read the full conversation.
London Fixed Gear and Single-Speed is a community of predominantly fixed gear and single-speed cyclists in and around London, UK.
This site is supported almost exclusively by donations. Please consider donating a small amount regularly.
@pascalo
Yes, there are variations of the XHTML doctype that don't trigger quirks mode.
However, there are also variations of the HTML 4 doctype that are as good in triggering standards mode.
Future proof, now that's a much more difficult statement. XHTML 1.0, especially when we're talking transitional, is very different from XHTML 1.1 or even 2.
XHTML 1.1 will have to be served as application/xhtml+xml, and that will pop up with a nice "not well formed XML" error if you miss out a self closing tag.
As soon as we move to HTML 5, how is the fact that you should remove the slash from all self-closing link tags, script tags, brs etc an indication that XHTML 1.0 is future proof? Unless you use the XML serialzation of HTML5 maybe, but I didn't look into that much, but again it's served with application/xhtml+xml, meaning a strict validation by the client and hence an error message instead of a page if there's a single mistake in.
While I agree that it is possible to do a standards compliant XHTML site and make sure everything is valid etc every time someone user generated content goes in, it also is a big pain in the ass that OTHER PEOPLE ON THE TEAM might forget about standards.
Large content managed sites that don't just use BBCode are something that I work with on a daily basis since a long time, and the outcome is exactly what hixie brings up: Invalid sites that claim to be XHTML. Thanks to copy & paste, negligence and all that.
By it's nature HTML4 and HTML5 are forgiving standards. XHTML on the other hand is designed to cop out early when served with application/xhtml+xml and otherwise just a lowercase approximation of HTML 4 in xml.
You might think it's horse shit, but unless you have a very harsh sanitization or a validation facility on every bit of content, then I'd suggest you stick with nice semantic HTML and are in a good position to then move on to HTML 5 and it's new tags and functionalities like CANVAS and VIDEO.
Just my 2p.