XHTML

XHTML = XML + HTML

Today I made my site XHTML compliant using this great validator tool from the World Wide Web Consortium. They're the reason why you can view and use the same site in Windows, Apple, Linux, etc. They call this interoperability, or the ability of a site or program to be cross compatible. This is why web applications have such a bright future.

Because of these standards, developers can focus more of their time on application features as opposed to compatibility with multiple systems. For example, GMail works on pretty much anything. Outlook, doesn't. And I imagine plenty of resources go into the development of Outlook, but since a lot of Microsoft's technology is proprietary as opposed to open source I imagine it's very difficult to create platforms that support their software. (If that's at all what Microsoft wants.)

Of course this really alters the business model, but that can be a topic of a totally different post.

So what does my site being XHTML complaint have to do with anything?

Nothing really. Someone could probably mine the data from my site, and I do get put a cool badge at the bottom of my page!

** Some of my blog pages are not XHTML compliant. This is because I am getting my content from a different site that isn't XHTML complaint. I'll probably get around to writing a script to fix that, but that opens a whole can of worms. I'll probably need to start thinking about caching my pages at some point as the page is slow enough already with all of the data transfer from Blogger to my site.