Should I be transitional or Strict?
Actually that is a difficult question, my answer would be, it depends. And it really does, the main factor is your experience, you see, if your are a very seasoned HTML developer/designer, have experience authoring sites based on standards, and you are still stuck in, for any unknown reason, old HTML code and you wish to start afresh, I strongly encourage you to step right ahead in XHTML strict, but be patient it takes a little to get used to.
Now if you wish to convert an existing HTML, one of those 1999 sites, you wish to keep using tables for layout, don’t care too much for semantics, then the logical step is HTML transitional, also consider your motivation to learn a new skill, this is very important.
Let’s look at it in more detail
Transitional Sites (XHTML Transitional)
These are the kind that forgive your misadventures in HTML code, they let you mix presentation markup with content, there is not a strict separation between them. Also you can still use deprecated elements and attributes like the target=”_blank”, you can apply presentational markup on certain elements, like tables, and it’s cells.
Also, you can still use tables to format your website, that is something that you should not do if you wish to author strict standard oriented website, remember that tables are meant to display tabular data.
There nothing wrong about transitional website, as a matter of fact, they are standards complaint, so do not despair, go ahead and try it, get some experience and then go ahead and dive into strict waters.
Strict Sites (XHTML Strict)
Well just by the name you know things are a little bit different than, transitional, well, actually, are a lot different. First of all, there is no mixing presentational markup with XHTML, for instance, no bgcolor attribute, no FONT tag, basically, all presentation should be done through a Cascade Style Sheet, also, you should stay away from using tables as a tool to give your site a certain look and feel, tables equal tabular data. Also there are stricter syntactical constrains.
The main thing you must always remember is, separation of content and presentation, slowly but surely you will gain the hang of it and you will never want to go back.
By now you can make a wise decision on which type of standard to use, as I said at the beginning of this article, it depends.
In the next article we will see more details and differences between them, also, we will be posting a quick guide on how to convert your HTML document to XHTML. See ya in the next article!