Re: Lynx as primary browser (was Re: [Lynx-dev] how to maximize

[David Woolley]

>                                 I know. I see the broad adoption of
> XHTML as a boon for Lynx since it facilitates more attention payed to
> document structure

I hope you realise that IE doesn't support XHTML so most of the
XHTML on the web is actually served as malformed HTML and therefore
is not checked for well formedness by browsers, so there is believed
to be an awfully large amount of not-well formed documents with
purporting to be XHTML.

In practice, until IE6 and down die, it would be better to serve
HTML written against a subset DTD with no optional tags (however
some legacy browsers may not like having explicit closing tags
on elements that are always empty).  (Actually, simply validating
an HTML document is sufficient because the ommission of tags is
only syntactic sugar and a validated HTML document has a well
defined parse tree and can be converted into canonical form (and
there are tools to do that).)

XHTML is used more for fashion and to look good on CVs.

Note that valid XHTML 1.1 will never work with IE because it is illegal
to serve it with a text/html media type.  IE will display valid 
XHTML 1.1 as the parse tree!