As many of you are aware XHTML is the replacement for HTML but just what exactly are the differences between the two? and is it really worth the switch over? Let’s find out.
HTML’s specifications where originally created by a physicist named Tim Berners-Lee. Over the years HTML’s codebase became an international standard (ISO/IEC 15445:2000) this meant that it was now possible to follow a certain guideline of industry standard coding and rendering HTML, the latter of course has most importance to the browsers.
The differences are very minor, but the results of switching can be worth the effort. The primary benefit is that XHTML is more widely accepted in non “computer” devices like mobile phones, palm devices and other scaled down browsers. This is one of the benefits of XHTML’s portability between devices.
XHTML is also extensible, which basically means that any new tags can be added without a new document type declaration.
What’s the difference between transitional and strict?
In short, transitional is a more forgiving form of doctype as it allows depreciated tags and attributes to pass validation, and the browser will do its best to render the page as you wanted it. You must still have the properly nested lowercase tags to obtain validation though.
The strict doctype is just that, all the depreciated tags and attributes will fail to validate under a strict doctype and may well render incorrectly as well.
So how does this affect me as an SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)?
With the incline of portable devices with internet ready capabilities more users are flocking in their hundreds and thousands to the web be it work, rest or play. Websites now more than ever are under constant scrutiny from these portable devices and in order to capture users from this ever increasing market websites are going to have to be compliant.
As always with SEO (Search Engine Optimization) there’s a never ending battle between development and standards. With the rise of more complicated site layouts being released all the time it makes certain websites inaccessible to users with less capable machines, the term “1 shoe fits all” no longer applies to the world wide web.
Within the last 5-6 years we’ve seen the boom in the popular web format .swf otherwise known as Adobe Flash. This is a brilliant product which has boosted the interactivity and lessened the “static-ness” of the internet for good.
Whilst flash has it’s benefits, like everything else that tastes good in this world, it also has it’s fair share of drawbacks. The major fault still apparent today as it was years ago, the download of the flash player needed to play those .swf files.
Most of the time working with whole flash websites for SEO’s is a nightmare, huge portions of content needs to be re-written so that the search engines have some static content to crawl through.
Another experience is using javascript to dynamically write in the flash movie into the document. Reason behind this is to ensure users on alternate web browsers will not get the famous “click to activate and use this control” warning. So from a user perspective you’ve now given 2 things that need to be enabled in the browser for the website to render correctly.
Some people like to use the <noscript> tag to determine that if javascript is not enabled display the following lines of code contained within the noscript. This is good but not solid enough to solely rely on. Some flash detection also needs to take place and if your willing to divert users who don’t make the grade to a HTML version of your website the better, not to mention this will also maximize your potential user base!
Whatever happens, whatever the drawbacks I can whole heartedly say that flash has made a huge impact on the way we interact with the web forever and with the speed flash is continually evolving I am very excited for the future.
