Not just that - the push is on (being led by the US at the moment I think) to make more & more sites 'accessible' to all users, that means people with disabilities too. If you do it right, redesigning your site for XHTML means that it will be accessible to older browsers, screen viewers, WAP devices etc. So not only will you not be marginalising anyone, you'll also be opening up your site to the widest possible market.

 

 

 

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Actually, if you want older browsers to understand your site, you should definitely stick to HTML and not use XHTML. If you want to make sure everything works I'd probably go for HTML 4.01 transitional.

XHTML forces you to do loads of things older browsers wouldn't understand. Seriously, IE, the most used browser right now doesn't understand XHTML, it just handles it like tag soup (this means IE just says "wow, this looks a bit like HTML, I'll see what happens if I render it like bad html").

 

 

 

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And what would those things be exactly? All XHTML forces you to do is mark up your document correctly - every opening tag must have a closing tag and tags/elements that became deprecated in HTML 4.0 cannot be used. The only other thing is that some tags have /> at the end of them which is not going to affect older browsers.



I'm not sure what you're basing this assumption on so am viewing it with some at the moment, but I do know that IE is losing market share hand over fist to Mozilla, so if you wanna continue living in the past and coding your pages as HTML 4.0, go right ahead.

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Okay, perhaps not loads of things, but how many old browsers do you think understand XML? Things like:
Or how about the very simple <br /> tag, which if your older browser is parsing things correctly (which it may or may not do) should make this

look like this




I don't know which assumption you are referring to, but at the moment IE has a market share of about 90%. The other assumption, that IE doesn't understand XHTML, is a fact. IE doesn't understand XHTML, it does parse it as tag soup, and it will totally break down if you send XHTML with the correct MIME type (application/xhtml+xml) instead of text/html.


I'm not saying XHTML is evil. And I'm not sure how much you really should take old browsers into account, IE6, possibly 5.5, is about as old as I usually bother with. XHTML can be terribly handy if you want to embed things like SVG or MathML into your documents (or perhaps plan on doing so in the future), but if you are mainly serving "normal" content to an IE audience you might ask yourself if it's worth switching.

You say that making HTML4 pages is "living in the past", to which I'd reply that I wouldn't be so sure that HTML4 will be replaced by XHTML, in fact chances that a new HTML version will emerge are far from small.

Go make XHTML pages, I do that too, as long as you realize that the only benefits you are making is when you are serving it to browsers that understand it, and with the correct MIME type. And that XHTML may not be the next widely used HTML version.

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I've seen IE's market share reported as anywhere from 64-83%, but definitely not as high as 90% and falling all the time.


I don't know what you're basing that assumption on, but the W3C HTML Working Group don't appear to be considering a new version of HTML. As far as I can tell (and this is what I thought was the case), HTML has been superseded by XHTML.


Until this thread, I hadn't read too much up on this, but this thread has some useful info on it with both pros & cons. At the moment, it appears you are right about not all browsers interpreting XHTML properly when sent with the correct mime type, so it seems the main advantage is in 'future-proofing' your sites for when all browsers do accept application/xhtml+xml. To me, there doesn't seem to be much dispute about things going this way, so whether you do it now or some time in the future, it's still gonna need doing. To my way of thinking anyway.

Aside from the technical issues, I also think using XHTML/CSS forces you to become a better web designer. I know it has for me.

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Yeah, the W3C are working hard on writing XHTML specs, but there is also the WHATWG, which is working on "HTML5", or Web Applications 1.0 as it's currently called (note that they call it HTML5 in the DOCTYPE). Check out the WHATWG website, or read a bit of what Anne van Kesteren has written about it (Anne has a neat blog about markup related things).

I think the W3C will continue working on XHTML, but there seems to be a demand from both web developers and browser manufacturers for a new (backwards compatible) HTML.

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Hmmm, it all seems a bit confusing at the moment - the two running parallel enabling backward & forward compatability. But it sounds like the choice of doctype you use should be determined by the type of content you intend putting on your site.

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Definitely. And I hope that IE will start supporting XHTML and/or more advanced browsers get a higher market-share. XHTML seems to have some neat potential things, dito for CSS3.

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IE7 will be bringing upon huge expectations for all web designers alike, esp. CSS2 support and Code Validation.

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It'll have to be exceptional for me to go back from using FF & Opera.

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