Final Edit
November 24, 2003
Last Updated February 9, 2008

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After all was said and done, I decided to stick with XHTML for this site. My observations and arguments appear on this page along with a list of additional improvements to the site.

Dealing With My Own Arguments
(answer to “Oops! Dead End”)

Forward compatibility was rejected as a reason for using XHTML. I still agree with this. Who knows the future? In the light of history, this is not even a valid consideration. Let’s work for the present time.

Serving XHTML as text/html to most existing user agents makes sense because this is the only way they can parse it. As for sending them “invalid HTML,” technically this is correct, but in practice, existing browsers are designed to parse tag soup, so it makes no difference. At any rate, the W3C engineered XHTML to work like HTML in existing user agents by using the same elements and attributes in both. That is why they were able to write HTML Compatibility Guidelines for XHTML. Enough said.

As I mentioned on another page, even Hixie states (in Appendix B of his text document) that serving XHTML as both MIME types is okay if you know what you are doing.

MIME Type Options Examined

Serve only HTML as text/html

Right for 95% and okay for the rest, but not forward thinking

Serve only XHTML 1.0 as text/html

Works for all but defeats the purpose of XHTML

Serve only XHTML as application/xhtml+xml

Works only for 5%—the rest cannot access the site at all

Serve only XHTML as either MIME type depending on the browser

Works for all and addresses the issue of XHTML support (this was our choice)

Serve PHP files as either HTML or XHTML depending on the browser

Works for all and addresses issues, but changing file extensions breaks old links. Also, server-side scripting delays page loading

Serve either HTML or XHTML via content negotiation

Works for all, addresses issues, and links are okay—but twice as many documents must be maintained. Also, content negotiation is not usually available under shared Web hosting

The NAME Attribute, the Q Element, and XHTML
Based on Testing and Research (October 25, 2003)

Our October 2003 website statistics yielded the following useful information:

• 0.24% of our traffic came from Internet Explorer 4 (all versions) and 0.82% from Netscape 4 (all versions). Neither of these can find a link target by its id attribute; they require the name attribute instead. They also do not support the Q element, but our special script makes it work just fine on Internet Explorer.
• Additionally, 0.02% came from earlier versions of IE and Netscape, and 0.05% came from PDAs and cell phones. None of these devices can find link targets by their id either.
• Very old browsers and mobile devices don’t support Q, ABBR or ACRONYM. A few other phrase elements are supported by some but not all. Moreover, they don’t support the entity codes for curly quotation marks either (they will display the “ or ” as text instead of rendering the marks), so they’re better off getting no quotation marks at all (which is what happens with Q).
• The world’s best browsers (Netscape 5, 6 and 7; Mozilla, including Firebird and Phoenix) accounted for 4.92% of our traffic. These browsers can understand XHTML when properly served as application/xhtml+xml (Opera 6 and 7 can also understand it, but they don’t send that information in the HTTP-ACCEPT headers, so they receive our pages as text/html instead).

What this means for our purposes is this:

• Dropping the name attribute could simplify the markup, but since it would foul up 1.13% of Internet devices in current use, the cost in terms of interoperability isn’t worth it. In the future, the number of older browsers will likely decrease, but mobile device usage is definitely on the rise. Therefore, we consider it imperative to use both attributes (id is required in XHTML) in link targets.
• Using the Q element instead of the longer entity codes for curly quotation marks, will ensure cleaner markup. It will work properly on 99.11% of Internet devices in current use; another 0.07% are better off getting no quotation marks at all than to get the curly ones. Both percentages are likely to increase in the future. Our choice to use Q becomes a no-brainer! Not so: see Version 10.6 below.
• Properly served XHTML will speed parsing for the 4.92% of browsers that receive it and can understand it. This makes it worth our while to use it, since that number will likely grow in the future.

A Hidden Advantage to Using XHTML

I discovered partway through the conversion from XHTML back to HTML that I was now getting horizontal scrollbars in Internet Explorer (curse Microsoft!). Previously I had thought that one of my scripts was fixing the problem; apparently I was wrong. Internet Explorer’s “standards-compliant mode” is what was causing the scrollbars. The ?xml prologue throws Explorer into quirks mode, and voila! no more scrollbars.

Both the ?xml prologue and the ?xml-stylesheet PIs are optional. If I use the former but not the latter, and serve MIME types according to the browser in use, everything should be okay.

There were other reasons for sticking with XHTML:

1. Most of the site was already written in it.
2. Suppose that at some future time, we decide that XHTML is the way to go. It is easier to simply keep it in XHTML now than to convert twice as many pages later.

Other Considerations

• Use clean URIs (mod_rewrite makes this possible)
• Use semantic phrase elements (JavaScript makes this practical)
• Keep the subdomains (designs and statistics are kept separate)

More Site Improvements

The version number changes whenever all (or most) pages of the primary domain are edited.

• Site Progress (Version 10.1, November 5, 2003) — cleaned up URIs using some mod_rewrite magic. Entire domain is now written in XHTML 1.0 Strict for the first time.
• More Fixes on This Site (Version 10.2, November 10, 2003) — improved rendering on IE 5.
• Design Update (Version 10.21, November 12, 2003) — improved rendering on IE 4; reversed order of entries on all News Archive pages; special styling for dfn elements.
• Bye Bye Digital Home (November 18, 2003) — site subtitle changed to something more meaningful. At this time I also revised the Home page layout and added the UTC time stamp near the top of the page.
• More Site Updates (Version 10.3, November 23, 2003) — improvements to the navigation bar.
• Presentation Themes Fixed (Version 10.4, November 29, 2003) — the look and feel of the site can be changed to any of four themes, from any page on the primary domain (the Umm themes were added on December 2). The themes work on Internet Explorer 4 or higher; Netscape or Opera 5 or higher; Mozilla and other standards compliant visual browsers.
• Netscape 4 Gets Presentation Themes (December 9, 2003) — only Pastels, Kittens, Umm Backgrounds (light colors only) and Minimalist are available. Dark Colors and the dark color Umms are not. Another theme was added the next day.
• Navigation Bars Cleaned Up (Version 10.5, December 11, 2003) — access keys for Search, Site Map etc. are now identified by a number in parentheses. This required another editing of the page markup.
• Latest Addition and Design Tweak (Version 10.51, January 13, 2004) — the Categories section of the News Archive was added. Bits of markup, scripts and style sheets were updated. The browser compatibility notice on the Home page was added at this time.
• IE Fix Completed (Version 10.6, February 3, 2004) — Converted all Q elements on ookingdom.com back to manual curly quotation marks (“ ”). Switched all ABBR tags to ACRONYM and removed altogether any such tags that were not expanded with a title attribute. Removed browser compatibility notice on the Home page, as it is no longer necessary.

  This change has been in the works for quite some time, as seen in these News Archive posts:

  • Automated Accessibility Verification Considered Harmful (November 5, 2003) — concern was expressed over the flickering caused by the script running on Internet Explorer.
  • What’s Going On Here? (January 8, 2004) — decision was made to switch back to manual curly quotation marks and ACRONYM tags, because of the flickering problem.
  • It Stands Once Again (January 8, 2004) — decision was made to keep the script, but use of the Q element was considered less critical than ABBR and ACRONYM “since manual quotation marks are semantically identical to the use of Q tags.”
  • Another Rebuild in the Works (January 28, 2004) — the double image loading and flickering was deemed “unacceptable,” paving the way for a new version which is still under construction at this writing.
• Stick a Fork In It—It’s Done (Version 11, March 17, 2004; read also March 18 entry) — Design issues included dropping the XML prologue to allow IE4/Mac to display our pages and allow IE6/Win to render pages in standards-compliant mode, and excluding Netscape 6 from receiving our pages as XML so it would run our scripts properly. Additionally, two sections of the site were renamed; style themes were revised; a new Contact page replaced the old email links; Ummamum’s Surprise was fixed to work properly on most browsers; the “Jump to navigation” link was made available to most browsers by using access key j.
• Version 12 Completed (May 21, 2004) — The entire domain was converted to PHP format. Doctype and MIME type are tailored to the browser in use. Entity codes for special punctuation marks are switched to plain marks for browsers that cannot understand the entity codes. A special style sheet is given to WebTV. Site maintenance is greatly simplified, thanks to modular internal structure.
• New Design Tweak: Version 12.01 (October 1, 2004) — Just a few style and scripting changes, and accompanying informational updates.
• Say Goodbye to the Style JavaScript (Version 12.1, November 20, 2004) — Client-side scripting to serve style sheets was replaced by server-side scripting to speed up page rendering. The News Archive was partially restructured ten days earlier.
• The Oo Kingdom Version 13 Completed (Version 13, February 17, 2005) — improved navigation, styling and server-side scripting; friendlier fonts and colors.
• If It’s Broke, Fix It (Version 13.1, May 16, 2006).
• Version 14 Unveiled (Version 14, November 13, 2007).
• Broken Website Layout Fixed (Version 14.1, February 9, 2008).