[FX.php List] Tired of making special solutions for every browser?

[Tim 'Webko' Booth]

>>>
>>> ---
>>> On the top of each of your solutions, you will have less problems.  
>>> Why?
>>> Because this is the DOCTYPE that most browsers renders in almost  
>>> the same way.
>>
>> I'd like for that to be true, but IE6 (still 20%+ of my users) will  
>> fail this rather badly - it didn't (and never will) have proper  
>> XHTML 1.0 compliance. If only IE had actually followed the  
>> standards in the first place!!
>>
>> Use of IE 6 specific style sheet hacks will get around the worst of  
>> it, but sometimes I still have to resort to table based layouts for  
>> very-very-backwards compatability. Which sucks.
>
> IE always did and always will suck, I agree. Not even in version 7,  
> which isn't THAT old, did Microsoft bother to follow some of the  
> most basic parts of web standards. If it was up to me, everyone  
> would stop using IE below version 8.
>
> However, one important thing to note regarding the common  
> misconception that writing your site in XHTML is the way to go, is  
> that the absolute majority of developers don't know how to do it,  
> resulting in that their site isn't interpreted as XHTML at all (they  
> just think everything is fine because all they look at is the  
> validator and output XHTML from their server).
>
> Unless you really feel confident that you know why I'm saying this  
> about XHTML, you are probably serving your XHTML pages as plain HTML  
> and/or your pages are just tag soup to the browser and/or it  
> interprets it in quirks/tolerant mode.

OK, now I'm intrigued - if I have declared my outputted page as XHTML  
in the head, and it then validates vs a decent validator, and it is  
valid XML - how is it not XHTML??

(Oh and don't get me wrong, for various reasons some of the sites I am  
'responsible' for are very badly broken on that level, but I know how  
and why)

Cheers

Webko