[WEB4LIB] to X or not to X

[Thomas Dowling]

Vicki Falkland wrote:

>hi folks,
>
>i've had a lingering thought for a long time now .."one day, when i get
>time, i'll convert the entire library site from HTML 4.01 Transitional to
>XHTML 1.0".
>i thought this was A Good Thing to do. i've done one page so far.
>
>however, today i stumbled across a discussion "XHTML is invalid HTML" at
>http://annevankesteren.nl/archives/2004/06/invalid-html.
>
>one commenter suggests it would be better to move from Transitional
>HTML4.01 to Strict, rather than move to XHTML. i certainly don't understand
>much of what's contained in the discussion ... "application/xhtml+xml", and
>character encoding (that one always leaves me staring blankly).
>
>i'd value opinions on what would be the best way to go .. should i go to
>strict, or to XHTML? or doesn't it matter so long as it validates? and what
>about the one page that already XHTML .. is the bit in my meta tag that
>says "text/html" wrong, and it's not XHTML afterall??
>
>  
>


IMO, of course...

The great leap forward here is from accepting whatever glop your copy of 
FrontWeaver pumps out, to giving a damn about markup standards at all.  
By asking this question, you know you're already on the right track.

Moving from any flavor of HTML to the corresponding flavor of XHTML is a 
pretty minor syntax change.  The failure of IE to handle XHTML's 
official MIME content type is a non-negligible issue, but a good server 
environment should be able to send either "application/xhtml+html" or 
"text/html" based on the browser's Accept headers.

Moving from either Transitional version to the corresponding Strict 
version is where you really get the benefits from distilling your markup 
down to clean structure.

Again IMO,  there's little advantage to moving from HTML to XHTML unless 
you either need to use other XML applications or editors, or you just 
want to play with XHTML. 


-- 
Thomas Dowling
OhioLINK - Ohio Library and Information Network
tdowling at ohiolink.edu