[Phpgroupware-developers] HTML / XHTML experience

[Alan Langford]

I have recently gone through the process of converting a fairly large 
e-commerce site from HTML to XHTML (transitional). Here's what I learned:

-- FireFox has a plug-in that embeds the Tidy validator in it. This makes 
the process of finding problems dead easy (and that little green checkmark 
in the status line is much cooler than a red X).
-- A number of "IE does this but FireFox does that" layout problems went 
away. I got to remove several <table> kludges that used to be required to 
fix layout glitches.
-- A bunch of code generation problems were caused by undiscovered bugs and 
general coding sloppiness. Fixing the output improved the quality of the code.
-- There was lots of "lazy layout" where formatting was being done with old 
HTML attributes instead of CSS. A few new styles fixed most of these issues 
and make it much easier to re-skin or to re-use the code in another 
application.
-- I was forced to dig back into the standards documents where I found or 
rediscovered capabilities that make for nicer Web pages (like my new 
friends "min-width" and "max-width"... very cool).
-- I can put a little "W3C Valid XHTML" logo on the pages and help promote 
a standards-compliant Web.

On the downside:
-- My old JS / ECMAScript based drop-down menu code failed to run. Open 
source alternatives were difficult to find (I wound up using "creditware" 
from twinhelix.com until I can get my own code running). Of course in the 
cage of phpgw, that' not a big problem.

There's no pressing reason that forces anyone to move to XHTML, but in my 
experience it was well worth the effort and I would recommend it in most cases.