Is the DOCTYPE Strict / is the page XHTML / is there an XML prolog?
I use HTML 4.01 Transitional, so clearly there wouldn’t be an XML prolog. Even if I used XHTML, there wouldn’t be one, since its presence triggers quirks mode in IE6/Win—thus the 100% agreement among the surveyed sites on its absence. So why HTML instead of XHTML? Because there continue to be no major advantages to valid XHTML over valid HTML, which is what I strive to attain. In some sense, there are disadvantages, albeit of a minor variety—I find trailing slashes on empty elements and the lack of attribute minimization to be annoying. If I’d learned XHTML first, I’m sure I wouldn’t care about them, and would wonder why HTML was deficient in those areas. Since I taught myself HTML when the cutting edge was HTML 2.0, I have some fairly deeply ingrained habits that cause me to lean toward HTML. I also have a decade’s worth of documents that I don’t really feel like trying to convert to XHTML just so I can claim big markup geek bragging points. Sure, there are tools that will do it for m
