HTML 4.01 or xHTML 1?
Dave Shea has decided to move away from implementing websites using xHTML and is using HTML 4.01. His main reason:
I made the switch more because of overall trends. Six years ago, many of us thought XHTML would be the future of the web and we’d be living in an XML world by now. But in the intervening time it’s become fairly apparent to myself and others that XHTML2 really isn’t going anywhere, at least not in the realm that we care about. For me, a guy who builds web sites and applications for clients that have to work in today’s browsers, XHTML2 is a non-issue. No browser support, no use to today’s web authors. End of story.
This is something I have not really thought about much over the last few years. I made the switch from HTML to xHTML and haven’t really looked back. Now, I am going to have to look into this. I don’t really see anything that xHTML offers over HTML 4.01. I do like the fact that xHTML is easier to parse using an XML parser, but this is a small point given libraries like Hpricot and Nokogiri.
What do others think? Is there any reason to use xHTML over HTML 4.01?
The stricter the better!
If it was practical, I’d love to use a proper mimetype when serving XHTML documents.
One thing that comes to mind, which Dave doesn’t mention is the fact that XHTML 1.0 Strict has been cleaned of a lot of the presentational elements that plagued us in the past. I wouldn’t want to go back to presentational markup again.