Minimal

I like it when people openly challenge dogma, so I found Emil Stenström’s article on Why XHTML is a bad idea to be a great read. I’ve used XHTML on my websites for a while now, moving to the strict version sometime last year, I think. As a programmer, the cleanliness of an XML-based markup language appealed to me and I was happy to go with the flow of the web community. I also liked the fact that various presentational tags (bold, italic, etc.) weren’t supported, discouraging me from including style code in the markup.

One thing that’s always bugged me, however, is the ease with which the site can fail to validate. Whether it’s through my own clumsiness (not converting ampersands in hyperlinks is a classic mistake) or through the comments others make on my posts, I find new errors nearly every time I use the validator (infrequently, btw). Recently, when I made the Afterbang templates for Gav, I made them XHTML too. I’ve regretted that ever since and keep meaning to switch the site back to plain old HTML. Gav’s no chump, but it’s still a bit much for me to expect him to adhere to XHTML’s restrictions when I keep forgetting them myself. For me, that’s the clincher. I can’t expect everyone who wants to contribute to one of my sites to be as pedantic as me.

Beyond all of that, however, Emil’s article has highlighted an issue that should’ve rung alarm bells in my head a long time ago. If my pages frequently aren’t validating, why is the browser displaying them at all? Why isn’t it freaking out in the way it does for duff .XML files? The answer, it seems, is that it’s not even parsing them as XML. And if that’s the case, why the hell am I using XHTML? I guess I was just following the herd after all. Still, at least I know now. :-/