Quote:
Originally Posted by ecchi
Hmm, seems to me that as soon as HTML 5 becomes "THE" standard, a hell of a lot of non-professional sites will break.
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HTML4.01 Transitional will still be supported, which supports the bgcolor and center tags, etc. HTML4.01 Strict does not support those tags, which is what a lot of sites should have moved to as it eliminates a lot of the cross-browser incompatibility. HTML4 was only standardized in 1999, and is supposed to be supported until 2024 if I recall the RFC.
As the line between websites and apps blurs, HTML5 offers a number of features that are extremely useful. You know all that code you need to play a flash video on IE and Firefox/Chrome/Safari? Single <video> tag now.
As for HTML4, I think there is a very good reason to move to CSS and stylesheets. If you are hoping that Google and the other search engines are going to give you some attention, it is in your best interest to separate the markup from the content. So, all of your styling elements, nested tables to get those borders, etc really should be done in CSS and moved out to an external file so that Google gets a page that is primarily content. It makes the spider's job easier. Also, if you use a common stylesheet on multiple pages, a surfer moving through your site has to fetch less data, resulting in faster pageloads.
All it takes is a missing " or missing </a> to really confuse the searchbots and possibly devalue that page. Having a page that validates without improper nesting to get some of those special borders around images or text, just seems like the right way to do it. With CSS, you can do interactive buttons as a list that work well on mobile without having to use a lot of JavaScript.
In the long run, I see nothing but benefits to use today's standards, rather than using what still happens to work.
I don't know that I would go back and change thousands of pages, but, I would probably focus on using these techniques from this day forward.