There are lots of good reasons to follow standards, but there is a difference between following standards and living on the bleeding edge for the sake of it.
The reason why I advice people not to use XHTML at the moment is that there are very very few people who are able to actually do it properly. Its just too hard for a number of reasons (see the thread at http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/msg00266.html). Part of the point of XHTML is that it is XML compliant and part of the basis is XML is its either valid XML or its broken. HTML 4 on the other hand is much more forgiving. In theory an XHTML document that is not valid should return an error rather than a best guess at the content. HTML 4 on the other hand should be rendered as best as possible regardless of any errors. In practice unless you are serving XHTML as an XML based mime type (which almost no one does because IE doesn't support it) the browser will render XHTML as normal HTML "tag soup" anyway, defeating the purpose of whole excerise. I guess I see bastardisation of XHTML as a long term problem that is going to prevent it ever performing as it is intended in the web space (i.e. as XML). This is because there will be so many broken legacy documents out there with XHTML doctypes that are not valid. Future compatibility is NOT an issue. Browser support for the early versions of HTML (1, 2 and 3) is still excellent and will continue to be. If the future compatibility issue is based around storing data as XML then check check out HTMLTidy (XML is only one step away from HTML with this tool). Also storing as XML and delivering as XML are two different things. I'm all for standards and when it becomes practical to implement the XHTML standard I'll gladly do it. I just don't feel that we've reached that point yet. All of this is of course just my personal opinion, take it or leave it but I feel its worth thinking about. Cheers Mark ------------------ Mark Stanton Technical Director Gruden Pty Ltd Tel: 9956 6388 Mob: 0410 458 201 Fax: 9956 8433 http://www.gruden.com ***************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ *****************************************************
