Re: [wgo] XHTML1.0 Strict vs HTML 4.01

["Quim Gil" <quimgil gmail com>]

Thank you very much for this insightful debate with many technical details. 

Let's see. 

- XHTML is the current recommendation of the W3C and they consider it an evolution of HTML. This has a strong weight on our project since we are commited to public standards.

- Microsoft has got time and resources to make IE compatible to XHTML and in fact it seems the support is there, only buried. They will have a reason for that, as they have reasons not to follow other standards. The reason is their political agenda, this agenda tries to fight... us.

We want to seduce Windows/Explorer users and our pages need to look good to them, but we have also a political agenda. Therefore, I recommend that we go for XHTML as any web developer in the world should do nowadays, and then make sure that we offer a decent degree of compatibility to IE users (
i.e. no "Too Good For IE" corners and such).

IMO that decent degree is based on pure usability and visual perception: if an IE user can browse and read the whole wgo and if they don't see broken images, margins and anything they notice as wrong... fair enough. There are ways to do this.

My basic reading before writing this email:
http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/#guidelines
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticisms_of_Internet_Explorer#XHTML
+ some Microsoft blogs and pages where managers and developers answer "No, we don't support XHTML" without giving more explanations.

-- 
Quim Gil /// http://desdeamericaconamor.org