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Maybe you should use HTML 4.01 Strict instead. There's not much point in using XHTML. http://www.spartanicus.utvinternet.ie/no-xhtml.htm

I wonder when the XHTML hippies will realise that XHTML is dead, and never was a good idea. Did you actually take the time to read the XHTML2 specification? It's a mess.

http://www.spartanicus.utvinternet.ie/no-xhtml.htm
http://www.autisticcuckoo.net/archive.php?id=2005/ 03/14/xhtml-is-dead
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2003/03/19/dive-into-xml. html

So we have to wait for 3.0 until "display: block-inline" works and we finally get rid of the horrible tricks explained on http://www.spartanicus.utvinternet.ie/centered_ima ge_gallery_with_captions.htm ?

Gecko is the last engine that doesn't have a working "display: block-inline". Quite annoying. I have even ignored a few of IE6.0's bugs as 7.0 is shipping now, but it's hard to ignore the lastest Firefox.

IE does understand and parse the XHTML doctype correctly.

You might want to do some research on why XHTML is over-hyped and can lead to future problems, because most web servers don't serve XHTML in the correct MIME type.

HTML4.01 is a standard too, ya know.

And yes, you can get IE6 to operate in STRICT mode (box type, etc.) if you supply the correct DOCTYPE. Further complicating things is the fact that Mozilla, Safari and Opera have an "almost standard" mode, which you can read about on the site I just linked.

For more information, check out QuirkMode's section on doctype and what it changes on the different browsers.

If I forget to close one of those and run it through the validator do I get any errors? Nope. Not without a custom DTD. For that reason alone I prefer xHTML.

But it's not an error in HTML. It's like considering an English essay wrong because it doesn't use question marks at the beginning and end of a sentence. Sure, it would be a mistake to omit the opening question mark in a Spanish essay, but that doesn't make the English essay any less right.

You don't have to write your own custom DTD either. If you had followed the link in Spartanicus' article, you would see that there's one already written. All you have to do is point your validator to it.

I agree that HTML is all about data structure, while the CSS should be about the layout. I just feel that xHTML takes it a step further by forcing (in my mind) a better standard.

Like I just said, HTML vs XHTML has nothing whatsoever to do with structure versus layout. They are the same.

but why HTML 4 as opposed to XHTML 1 Strict?

Here is a good list of reasons why HTML4 is preferable to XHTML.

Does it fix the xhtml served properly (as xhtml+xml) problem?

Demo/test page: http://www.spartanicus.utvinternet.ie/demo.xhtml

On IE6, that pops up a prompt asking if you'd like to save it. The proper behavior is to parse it.

I'd love to know if that was fixed.