Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
Jeff Schiller writes:
It turns out, as Shelley has mentioned, that the best developer experience to work on XHTML is also (by far) Opera. Instead of Firefox’s “yellow screen of death” we’re greeted with Opera’s “light grey screen of mild achiness”. Instead of cryptic messages about unexpected tags, the element which failed to be terminated and the tag that broke the XML parsing are highlighted for you.
Jeff just finished creating a new site design that incorporates XHML+SVG. He also did something I didn’t think to do, which was submit a bug to Mozilla for the poor way Firefox manages bad XHTML. Opera really does provide a beautifully graceful way of dealing with bad XML, including an option to re-parse the page as HTML. Even Safari does a better job than Firefox.
Jeff is also using content negotiation with his site, which I don’t use with this site. Because of this decision, my stats show that only 3.9% of page accesses are from IE. I do support content negotiation for my topmost site, which is accessed about 39% of the time with IE. However, I have been recently rethinking my decision to use content negotiation.
I run the risk of losing page views by serving pages up as XHTML. At the same time, though, if more of us did this, I wonder how much this would hasten the demise of browsers that don’t support what is now a fairly mature standard specification?
Sometimes you have to “break the web” in order to save it.
