So long, its been good to know you…
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd”>
I’ve tried to keep HR’s halfVAST Blog in compliance with XHTML 1.0 Strict markup since I “remodeled” it back in July 2006. And up to now I have managed to keep a large portion of it in compliance without too much effort on my part.
However, with the advent of “Web 2.0,” which by the way is supposed to foster good design and coding standards, it has become much more difficult and time consuming to remain in compliance with the XHTML 1.0 Strict standards.
Why is this, you ask? Well, one of the major culprits is something called Mashups. Using the Mashup concept, one can integrate a lot of really great stuff from external sources into their site rather than having to buid them all from the ground up. One example of this is YouTube, the quite popular free video sharing web site.
So why isn’t this a “Good Thing” you ask? Well, actually, it is. But the downside is that the code snippets, or APIs in Web 2.0-speak, are quite often not compliant with XHTML 1.0 Strict (or even XTHML 1.0 Transitional) markup.
And APIs are not the only culprits. The XHTML 1.0 Strict standard itself has some flaws (my opinion) that discourage widespread usage. The most notable (again my opinion) is the removal of the “target” attribute, which provided a painless way to tell the web brower where to load an incoming page (over existing page, on a new page, etc.). There are numerous Javascripts available that compensate for this, but the bottom line is that there is no “standard” replacement for the target attribute.
So its back to the old ways for HR’s halfVAST Blog. If you peruse the source code or HTTP Headers in the future, this is what you will see:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd”>
I guess the old “Standards Are Made To Be Broken” law is still on the books.