XHTML and Google

Does google like XHTML?

[RussellC]

I have recently been validating my sites as HTML 4.01 Transitional. For one of my 'experemental/personal' sites I went ahead and validated to XHTML 1.0 standards. I have been doing alot of thinking and I'm really starting to like XHTML. It seems alot cleaner.

Since it is not hard to convert a validated HTML 4.01 site to XHTML 1.0, would there be any harm to my SERPS, namely in google, to switch my HTML sites to XHTML? I heard there were problems with some of the tags, especially when closing meta tags like this:
<meta name="robots" content="index,follow" />

Anyone having great success with XHTML?
Thanks.

[SmallTime]

I've done several sites in xhtml, and they seemed to do well. I keep the metatags to a minimum, so can't say how they are affected.

[ciml]

I can't see that you'll have any problem, RussellC.

If Google was an HTML 4 parser then the META tags would be invalid HTML (due to the extra > characters, but it's not so there's no need to worry.

[RussellC]

Thanks ciml, I'm am using a site to test some XHTML transitional pages as well as some XHTML strict + CSS formatted pages. Should be interesting to see how they turn out.