Allan_Rasmussen - 9:49 am on Apr 3, 2006 (gmt 0)

So in that case has anyone noticed differences in rendering when changing their site (but not CSS) between HTML 4 and XHTML.

There can be changes in the DOM, yes. Certain elements are not implied, for instance tbody and tfoot (and head & body, but those are required to be there explicitly in XHTML documents).

XHTML is hardly going to be a dead technology, as the W3C supports it, unlike what they do with HTML. And Chris Wilson, "the group program manager for the web platform and security in Internet Explorer", has publicly stated that he is a big supporter and/or fan of XHTML (I don't remember the exact wording, search for it on the IEBlog if you must know), and the IE-team have implied that its support is planned for a future version of IE.

Hmmm... The W3C uses XHTML Strict with content="text/html". Sounds fishy.

Why? First of all, if you visit w3.org the page will be sent as application/xhtml+xml if your UA supports it. Secondly, far from every high profile web developer seems to agree with Ian Hickson that 'XHTML sent as text/html is considered harmful', just look at the homepages of David Baron and Tantek Celik, to mention the first two that pops into my mind...

Update: Just searching for a similar topic, I stumbled upon [times.usefulinc.com...] where Edd Dumbill also outlines that it's not a fact that sending XHTML as text/html is considered harmful (and critizises the objectivity of the Google Web Authoring statistics, incidentally one day before I did [blog.skalske.dk], but that's probably another discussion...). And btw., the two IBM developerWorks articles he's linking to is surely worth reading, if you haven't already!

[edited by: Allan_Rasmussen at 10:04 am (utc) on April 3, 2006]