Why Do You Use XHTML 1.0 Strict?

I just graduated to Transitional

[bumpaw]

Yesterday my personal site got elevated to HTML 4.01 with the neat little W3C image links. I was so proud that today I upgraded it to XHTML 1.0 Transitional. It even sports the little CSS validation merit badge. All the talk about the revised on line validator just filled me with inspiration.

Now why go further with a statement like this from the W3C?

XHTML 1.0 Transitional - Many people writing Web pages for the general public to access might want to use this flavor of XHTML 1.0. The idea is to take advantage of XHTML features including style sheets but nonetheless to make small adjustments to your markup for the benefit of those viewing your pages with older browsers which can't understand style sheets. These include using the body element with bgcolor, text and link attributes.

Some of things I've been seeing lead me to believe that the web in general is not quite ready for XHTML Strict. I could use some more inspiration to push further.:)

[edit] I sure wish I could stick an "L" in the subject. [edit]

[tedster]

For us, the move from transitional to strict is the big jump, and not the move from html to xhtml. In fact, I'd say that xhtml 1 is not likely to become standard and the eventual evolution of xhtml (or whatever it ends up being) that does become standard will be another shift.

In the practical world, I think learning strict mark-up is the essential. We're just now moving our new development to html 4.01 strict

take advantage of XHTML features including style sheets

must mean XSL there, I guess.

I added the "L" to the thread title

[bumpaw]

In the practical world, I think learning strict mark-up is the essential.

Is HTML4.01 Strict a higher standard than XHTML 1.0 Transitional? It's a little confusing to me and I couldn't find a simple side by side comparison at W3C.

[tedster]

Strict means, for one thing, that you don't use any of the deprecated attributes and elements [webmasterworld.com]. That's what I mean when I say that "strict" is the big jump -- it forces you to make some big changes in your approach to mark-up when you can't dive for the easy attributes like <p align="center"> or <td width="200px">.

The shift to XHTML is relatively easy if you keep using the transitional mark-up. Mostly global changes like get rid of uppercase, close your tags, quote your attributes etc.

But learning how to achieve the rendering effects you want without using the deprecated bits - that's more of a challenge.

[normaldude]

I'm the opposite. I'd rather be like market leading websites like Yahoo, Ebay, Amazon and Google.. none of which validate under HTML 4.01 strict.

But what Yahoo, Ebay, Amazon and Google all have in common is that they look just fine in crappy browsers like Netscape 3.0. I prefer to have a website that looks fine to 99.9999% of browsers.. rather than adhering to some idealistic w3c standards.