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Many people want to use XHTML to author their web pages, but are confused about the best ways to deliver those pages in such a way that they will be processed correctly by various user agents. This Note contains suggestions about how to format XHTML to ensure it is maximally portable, and how to deliver XHTML to various user agents - even those that do not yet support XHTML natively. This document is intended to be used by document authors who want to use XHTML today, but want to be confident that their XHTML content is going to work in the greatest number of environments. The suggestions in this document are relevant to all XHTML Family Recommendations at the time of its publication.
XHTML Media Types - Second Edition
Serving the Most Appropriate Content to Multiple User Agents from a Single Document Source
2009-01-16 - [w3.org...]
There are a few interesting tidbits in there. For example, this question always arises about unescaped ampersands.
A.12. Using Ampersands - DO ensure that when content or attribute values contain the reserved character & it is used in its escaped form &.Rationale: If ampersands are not encoded, the characters after them up to the next semi-colon can be interpreted as the name of a entity by the user agent. The document could also be considered not "well-formed" by an XML processor.
If you do not require the advanced features of XHTML Family markup languages (e.g., XML DOM, XML Validation, extensibility via XHTML Modularization, semantic markup via XHTML+RDFa, Assistive Technology access via the XHTML Role and XHTML Access modules, etc.), you may want to consider using HTML 4.01 [HTML] in order to reduce the risk that content will not be portable to HTML user agents.
What debate?
:-)
