What difference does using the XHTML standard really make?
Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2009-06-18 13:19:24 - Graham EllisI enclose my HTML attributes in quotes - or at least when I remember, I do!
I always provide a matching close tag to go with each opening tag - except when I forget to do so, or am in a hurry
I make sure I provide an alt attribute with each image - although sometimes I really don't know what I would say in such a tag, so I skip it
If I need an & character, I encode it as & - mind you, when I cut and paste I may miss some!
What difference does it really make to the people viewing my pages if I've got of few of these transgressions?
It was pointed out to me the other day that one of the sites I looked after didn't conform to the XHTML transitional standard in one area of the page, and there was also a specific user problem being reported. Nad it's very nice to have a "we confirm" logo there. So I took the opportunity to add a poll to the site, for regular users, asking if the changes I had made (which cleared 96 errors and 1 warning!) had made any difference to users.
I'm going to conclude that the exercise was worth doing, as it gives me a nice warm feeling. It will make things better for the occasional person. It's suggested that it will now render faster (not sure if I believe that). It stops people telling me that can't see my page because the HTML is broken (even if the reason they can't see it is something else - like our site is blocked at their work place because it's too good and they spend too long with us). And it probably help our search engine ranking - the cleaner the code, the easier for the search engine to understand it, and the more professional it looks.