XHtml Websites Calm My Fears
Since Erin and I moved into our new house,
we’ve had some little projects to do here and there. The house is
also about 80 years old, so there will certainly be more to do in the
next year or two. To help us out while we do these projects, Erin
signed us up for a 2 year subscription to Angies List (www.angieslist.com).
This is a web site where people can write about their experiences
in home improvement and rate vendors, give prices, etc. The 2
year subscription was something like $75, so I kind of freaked out at
first, but then she reminded me that I pay $25 a year for my Flickr subscription and about the same for some domain names, so its hard to argue with the logic there 
Anyways, on to the point of this post. So when I went to
angieslist.com, the site looks very cleanly designed, and there are no
ads (which is why the subscription is what it is). Now, for some
reason you can just tell when a website has an XHTML doctype, and this
was one of them. So I viewed the html source to confirm what I
thought, and I was right, the site uses xhtml transitional. For
some reason when I see that a website has an xhtml doctype, their
credibility with me goes through the roof. I don’t know if its
the inner geek that just likes xhtml, but you know that if they went
and found a development shop that does standards based development, it
was probably a pretty good place that cost a decent amount of
money, and it shows that the people are running a legitimate
business. So in the face of Erin’s logic and the standards based
website, I’m cool with the 2 year subscription
jpalermo said,
Wrote on October 19, 2005 @ 2:35 pm
Yep. Using a complete doctype is enough to elevate my opinion of the site. The common website tools default to an incomplete doctype, so when a complete one is used, you know the folks knew what they were doing. Xhtml 1.0 transitional is probably the most realistic doctype we’ll use until the next generation of CSS (3.0) and browsers.
Anonymous said,
Wrote on October 20, 2005 @ 4:26 pm
In my opinion, the difference between html and xhtml is completely unimportant. It is the distinction between strict and transitional that really matters. If you’re validating to a strict doctype, no matter whether it is HTML or XHTML, it’s an excellent indication that you’ve seperated content from style, but both of the transitional doctypes, xhtml and html allow all kinds of nasty garbage to sneak into your page *cough* font tag *cough*.
breichelt said,
Wrote on October 20, 2005 @ 5:07 pm
Chris, I agree with you about the distinction between transitional and strict, but one thing that I like about xhtml is that the web page is a well formed document, its not a huge problem for browsers, they do a perfectly good job of rendering malformed html, but I just like knowing that someone took the time to do the job right, ya know