I have recently gone through the process of converting a fairly large
e-commerce site from HTML to XHTML (transitional). Here's what I learned:
-- FireFox has a plug-in that embeds the Tidy validator in it. This makes
the process of finding problems dead easy (and that little green checkmark
in the status line is much cooler than a red X).
-- A number of "IE does this but FireFox does that" layout problems went
away. I got to remove several <table> kludges that used to be required to
fix layout glitches.
-- A bunch of code generation problems were caused by undiscovered bugs and
general coding sloppiness. Fixing the output improved the quality of the code.
-- There was lots of "lazy layout" where formatting was being done with old
HTML attributes instead of CSS. A few new styles fixed most of these issues
and make it much easier to re-skin or to re-use the code in another
application.
-- I was forced to dig back into the standards documents where I found or
rediscovered capabilities that make for nicer Web pages (like my new
friends "min-width" and "max-width"... very cool).
-- I can put a little "W3C Valid XHTML" logo on the pages and help promote
a standards-compliant Web.
On the downside:
-- My old JS / ECMAScript based drop-down menu code failed to run. Open
source alternatives were difficult to find (I wound up using "creditware"
from twinhelix.com until I can get my own code running). Of course in the
cage of phpgw, that' not a big problem.
There's no pressing reason that forces anyone to move to XHTML, but in my
experience it was well worth the effort and I would recommend it in most cases.
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