Getting down with the OC: Life with XHTML 1.0 Strict

I’ve realized that I’m hopeless when it comes to code. When I’m writing PHP or C or even XHTML, I’ve got an obsessive-compulsive thing going. I like clean code. It makes me happy. To that end, you’ll notice that the Validation links are high on the page on this blog – oh, and they’re on every page. I want my XHTML to validate. It’s a simple thing really. I want the best for my websites, and validating code ensures a consistent experience across browsers (damn you, IE 5.0 for Mac users! it’s time to upgrade!).

A long time ago now, I shifted the coding on this website from XHTML 1.0 Transitional to XHTML 1.0 Strict. To me, it’s a point of distinction. It’s actually not that hard to do, but most people I think don’t have the web chops to get it done. The main difference between Transitional and Strict is cleaner code – it’s a greater separation of content and presentation. XHTML 1.0 Strict has a lot fewer legacy attributes left over from the early days of HTML. It’s a more modern language, and definitely it appeals to that OCD side of my soul that wants code that is screamingly fast and clean.

This blog also still uses static pages. I do a lot of dynamic programming in the real world, but for my personal stuff, I chose to have old school static pages that load quickly. No need to query the database seven or eight times to assemble my pages. Just a quick “text/html” dump to the browsers with a few calls for CSS, images and JavaScript and what not.

And once you’ve made the leap to XHTML 1.0 Strict, it’s just a quick upgrade to XHTML 1.1. I’ve gotten this blog to validate as XHTML 1.1, and it probably still would in its current form. As you may know, the reason for not going high-tech with XHTML 1.1 is that the W3C insists that XHTML 1.1 should be sent as XML and not as our old familiar text/html MIME type. That would be fine if everybody used Firefox or Mozilla, etc., but Internet Explorer (all versions) still does not support the MIME type that XHTML 1.1 is suggested/required to use.

Okay, XHTML 1.0 Strict. I recommend the upgrade as a learning experience. Getting your pages to validate as Strict is a lesson in separating structure from presentation. You’ll learn how to let the CSS do the visual stuff, and the XHTML manage blocks of content. My CSS is probably not up to the specs of the semantic web, but we manage. I dislike CSS enough to not worry about it to much. I can write it fine, but you’ll have to ask Faust for some of the finer points of CSS that are lost on me.

As an aside: Abigail made it to New York yesterday. She’s paying an ungodly sum for a two-bedroom apartment in Manhattan (her half of the rent is $2,000/mo. or so). I was telling her about the Limelight – which was this club in an old gothic Episcopal church at Sixth Ave and West 20th St that I went to in the early ’90s. It got shut down eventually, and later re-opened as the Avalon. Apparently that’s closed now too, and the church is becoming some kind of shopping mini-mall. Strange. Another early ’90s New York memory was a great Halloween-night show at CBGB featuring Cop Shoot Cop. As a Sunday bonus, here is If Tomorrow Ever Comes [removed] off of their album White Noise. Warning: it’s noisy!