Is XHTML a waste of time?
Posted on April 14th, 2010
Whilst discussing the fundamentals of a new web project with my erstwhile colleague at work the other day (a colleague I should add who likes to question every minute detail – you know the sort). He made a rather convincing argument to scrap XHTML coding and move over to HTML5.
HTML 4.01 to 5.0
With a gestation period from the last release of html 4.01 (back in 1999) to the release of HTML 5.0 planned for 2015! that dwarfs Microsoft’s tardy release schedules (IE 6 – 7 anyone) – there’s certainly time to weigh up the decision. The simple fact remains that XHTML was a nice idea that never really took off as it should have, seeming to be one long diversion for the W3Cs HTML Working Group.
Well what do you validate against?
From my earliest exposure to HTML (maintaining vintage code written around the early 90s) – I was determined to stick to a standard that avoided broken tags, and hideous (from a purely code aesthetic point of view if nothing else) tabled layouts – XHTML 1.0 seemed to be the answer. For many years I made a point to code to this standard and took pride validating my sites with the W3C validator. If nothing else I felt this gave my code a fighting chance of rendering in a handful of the popular browsers.
From the horses’ mouth: