gio’s WeBlog

XHTML coding which was released back in 2000, has become the most popular web standard today. We all know that designing a website using valid XHTML coding has many benefits. One important advantage to using xhtml is the strict nature of valid documents which contains no errors. Documents or web pages with no errors are both search engine friendly and browser friendly. Users viewing XTHML pages loads faster because browser can parse them easily thus performing much efficiently. Also, search engines can easily crawl valid documents and can index them faster. When I completed validating this whole site/blog, I started to see some positive changes in my traffic and I also noticed googlebot loves to crawl my site.

Although there are many schools that offer web design or online graphic design degrees, most of them do not encourage you to use valid XHTML documents. But what’s the difference between XHTML Strict and Transitional? XHTML Strict is stricter of the two flavors of XHTML. This means that it separates the structure from the presentation elements and does not allow presentational elements and attributes that have been deprecated while Transitional allows it. The Strict mark-up is a bit harder to implement especially with large complex sites that is why is a good idea to use Transitional mark-up first then later on to Strict.

No matter how hard the Strict mark-up is, it is what we should aim for because it’s “future proof”.