Over at Script & Style, I saw this article, "XHTML — Myths and Reality". I’m pretty new to web design, doing it for a few months (been in print design for years), so I found this really interesting. The websites I’ve made I’ve been using XHTML transitional as the doctype. This article and this other one I found at Site Point, after Googling "xhtml vs html doctype", were kind of surprising, since I don’t really know any better.
Some interesting points from the Site Point article were:
- In reality, the latest W3C recommendation with widespread support is HTML 4.01. Unless you actually need any of the features that XHTML offers over HTML, there is no technical reason to use XHTML.[/*:m]
- For ‘future-proofing’ your documents, using a Strict doctype is more important than whether you use XHTML or HTML.[/*:m]
- Many authors still advocate XHTML over HTML out of ignorance or because of personal preference.[/*:m]
- Is XHTML supported by all browsers? No. Only a few mainstream browsers support XHTML, like Opera, Firefox and Safari.[/*:m]
- Can I use XHTML with Internet Explorer? No. Not really.[/*:m][/list:u]
So I started going to other big sites and looking at their doctypes and was surprised to see (can’t believe I never noticed before) that many use HTML 4.01, such as Apple and Yahoo.
After a bit of reading, it seems like there’s no real advantage for most web designers to use XHMTL unless they need XML. What do you guys think? For those of you with real-world experience, has this been an issue for you ever?
