To XHTML or not to?
 

I know some sites have strict policies about what browsers they support. But what about those who are just deciding that?

XHTML 1.0 , CSS 2 and ECMAScript are a great way of making a great site: separation of content from presentation (beyond programming MVC, at design level), the posibility of creating new designs and layout just by creating a new CSS file, etc...

Do we still have to do TABLE-based layouts, with up to 4-5 levels of nested TABLEs which are impossible to read by hand, and risk a disaster of some browsers, or just go with layers (DIVs) and CSS positioning?

Sites like A List Apart (http://www.alistapart.com) have gone to great lenghts to convince us that conding according to standards is the right thing to do, but all wise people know that there is no such thing as the "one true thing".

So... what do you support?

Because I am stupid, I hand code all HTML, and it's all generally prett y simple and elegant. I don't use any fancy tools - VIM is it. However, I think there is definitely a place for newer stuff like Flash. I personally want to use Flash on my new site to do some artsy fartsy stuff, but that's just me.

Anyway, the point is, I think for just simple information, straight HTML is fine. For sites where you actually want to <b>present</b> something, do whatever you want. As long as I can view it on Linux :)

I've been using plain ol' HTML for 4 years now, and make the setup for my site specifically for NS 4.x (b/c I will never surrender it! ;) ). I've been using FrontPage and IE more recently though, and I try to make sure that the site looks good on both NS and IE.

Sadly, I don't know what XHTML is, although I've heard of it.

Vim and hand-coding HTML is the only way to go. Adding CSS to the mix is awesome and can be done easily and bit-by-bit.

Most of the Cellar is old-style and doesn't support a lot of CSS. But people in the know say that if CSS were properly implemented for vBulletin (which runs the Cellar), it could save about a third of the transfer time, because there is so much composition HTML in the software.

CSS/HTML was a terrible idea and a terrible implementation. They require two entirely different parsers, and in order to properly interpret one standard, a program needs full knowledge of the other.

russotto, that's why most browsers are also available as embedable controls (IEcontrol and Mozilla's Gecko can be reused in your app and interacted with at DOM level).

CSS is nice, because it enables style reuse and templating, w/o the need of server-side applications.