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Why SHOULD I use XHTML?


iyeru42

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It matters to me though, no matter what my connection is, I'm all about file size.
Then you're an imbecile.Sites calculate google PR by the number of sites that google shows that link to you, by doing a google query of link:example.com. How high you appear on a google search is mostly affected by the number of links coming to your site with that specific phrase. For example, I'm sixth with News, politics, business and technology blog lol but noone's gonna search that.
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However, Google is notorius for not including other searches as well that Ask and Altavista (Mind you, Altavista's hosted by yahoo) have. So I don't usually count google, because Ask and Altavista already have about 5~10 pages of my new site within five days of putting it up.

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Sites calculate google PR by the number of sites that google shows that link to you, by doing a google query of link:example.com. How high you appear on a google search is mostly affected by the number of links coming to your site with that specific phrase. For example, I'm sixth with News, politics, business and technology blog lol but noone's gonna search that.
true but that isnt the only factor that determines page rank. from googles site:
Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it's a good match for your query.
about new content:
Mega-sites, like http://news.bbc.co.uk have tens or hundreds of editors writing new content – i.e. new pages - all day long! Each one of those pages has rich, worthwile content of its own and a link back to its parent or the home page! That’s why the Home page Toolbar PR of these sites is 9/10* Principle: Content Is King! There really is no substitute for lots of good content…
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thats great but Google, Yahoo, and Windows live make up over 80% of all searches. Google alone makes up over 52%. So ignoring the single biggest opportunity to advertise your site is not wise.It is not that google doesn't include search that other do. Every search engine indexes and searches diffferently. If you are not getting indexed well in Google it is because you are not playing by their rules.Just to say one about your original question, it is like asking "Why shoudl I use nails to build a house when glue works just fine". The point being XHTML is the standard and all browsers, even IE, is moving toward supporting standards and as time passes it will get harder and harder to get sites to look good using tag soup/quirksmode style code. You can agree or not but that doesn't change the fact that it is true.

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agreed, the tiny amount you save in file size is not worth the damage you may do your site with these "custom tags"

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Windows Live is actually a different protocol than MSN Search. Also, I get about 2~5 of their spiders (Google crawl) a day on my board, so I don't know what you people are saying.

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Windows Live is actually a different protocol than MSN Search. Also, I get about 2~5 of their spiders (Google crawl) a day on my board, so I don't know what you people are saying.
They search sites regualrly for new content, that doesn't mean you will get a high ranking. And we were taking about your custom tags not a off the shelf messageboard (unless you are using these custom tags to mod the board).
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That's the reason I don't use XHTML, because I have to use a source file. It just seems extra weight is attached.
Actually, in order to have a valid document of any type, you need a doctype. Even for HTML 4.01 transitional, that's not something that is unique to XHTML. But that still doesn't answer why you use custom tags. I typically don't use XHTML either, and I also don't use custom tags, so I'm still clueless as to why you think custom tags are a good idea. You have not answered that question yet in this thread.
I could, but then it would have more bytes attached to the file. Using the TAGGER tag and using the CSS I provided causes the file(s) to have less space attached.
That argument is rediculous. You are sacrificing validity and well-formedness for a few bytes? You think that's a good tradeoff? If you are all about file size, then consider this. You can replace all of your <tagger> tags with <p> tags, which are obviously smaller, and then you can set the CSS on the <p> to be whatever you have for <tagger>. If you don't use <p> anywhere else except to replace <tagger> then it's a 1-to-1 replacement, it becomes valid, and it's smaller. So, I'll ask this question for the fifth time, what is the point of custom tags? Your argument for a smaller file size is a baseless argument.
However, Google is notorius for not including other searches as well that Ask and Altavista (Mind you, Altavista's hosted by yahoo) have.
That's good, because I'm searching Google, I'm not interested in results from other search engines. If I wanted to search Altavista I would go there. If I wanted to search more then one search engine I would go to dogpile.com. Google has a superior page ranking algorithm over all other search engines, in fact they were the first one to bring the idea of a search engine that uses backlinks to determine page importance to market. And they are still the best, the majority of internet users agree. How many clients do you think you are going to get if you say that you ignore Google when designing their site?Your thread asks the question of why should you use XHTML. Let me ask you this. Why should you not use it?
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Here's the answer for the custom tags. Yes I know, the P tag may be smaller in size, but I don't want to have all my P tags act the same way (Same with DIV tags.) Hence the custom tags.There are other sites out there that use their own page ranking system too, and not by Google's standard's either.

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Here's the answer for the custom tags. Yes I know, the P tag may be smaller in size, but I don't want to have all my P tags act the same way (Same with DIV tags.) Hence the custom tags.There are other sites out there that use their own page ranking system too, and not by Google's standard's either.
Then why don't you put a class on a p and make it "act" like you want it to? Or simply use CSS' selectors to target only specific "p"s you want?Google doesn't have a "standard" in the same essence HTML is a standard. And as mention, not following the rules that the most successful search engine is really not wise.
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Then why don't you put a class on a p and make it "act" like you want it to? Or simply use CSS' selectors to target only specific "p"s you want?
Really.<tagger>content</tagger><p_class="a">content</p>Counting the space, that's ten potentially superfluous bytes when using tagger, just like when using p. And you can make your pages search engine-, and thus user-, friendly.And your signature makes no sense:
I haven't used XHTML since I began doing webpages in 1999, don't tell me to start using it now.
If you started making websites in 1999, XHTML wasn't even a standard or recommendation back then. XHTML 1.0 was announced a recommendation on January 26 2000.http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/REC-xhtml1-20000126/Of course, no one can force you. It really just comes down to whether or not you want to keep up with the times and help the web grow to its full potential.
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It takes as much effort to do XHTML instead of HTML, why do it wrong and risk losing your page display due to the progression of browsers and loss of support for old coding languages or when in the future you need to showoff a webpage for a job or something, nobody will be impressed that you made a page in HTML when there are millions of other people that can make a page in XHTML.

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Guest FirefoxRocks

Browser vendors and major software makers are moving up the standards support to support more and more of XHTML. It's true that HTML won't be dropped on the floor anytime soon but XHTML is going to be a huge thing in about 2 or 3 years (estimating).If you use custom tags, why don't you use XML? They allow almost any tag you want! Use XSLT or CSS to get it to look like (X)HTML.It's ridiculous that you are sacrificing valid pages for file size. I think that my priorities for my site are:1. Usability2. Valid3. SpeedAnd many more can go in between 2 and 3. But if that's your explanation then it is just plain stupid!Take our advice and use browser-compliant tags and XHTML, you'll be glad you did.

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Well then, could you please tell me how to write an XHTML version of my current site (Use the index page as a base, don't worry about the others) whilist keeping ALL CSS STYLES INTACT? (Yes, I want the menu coming out of the newsbox, yes... I want the newsbox to be controlled by JS, because then I have less code to output.)

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Guest FirefoxRocks
Well then, could you please tell me how to write an XHTML version of my current site (Use the index page as a base, don't worry about the others) whilist keeping ALL CSS STYLES INTACT? (Yes, I want the menu coming out of the newsbox, yes... I want the newsbox to be controlled by JS, because then I have less code to output.)
Sure. Here is your index.html page. I even optimized the code a little for you.
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"><html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><head><title>iyeru42 Designs :: Inertia Project</title><link rel="stylesheet" href="main.css" type="text/css" /><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1" /><script src="main.js" type="text/javascript" /><!--[if lt IE 7]><script defer="defer" type="text/javascript" src="pngfix.js"></script><![endif]--></head><body><p><img src="board/images/logo.png" style="border:0px;width:400px;height:70px" title="iyeru42 Designs" alt="iyeru42 Designs" /></p><center><div id="wrapper"><script type="text/javascript"><!--//--><![CDATA[//><!--document.write(news);//--><!]]></script><div id="navigation"><a href="index.htm">Home</a><a href="board/index.php">Board</a><a href="MODs/index.php">OvBB MODs</a><a href="proj.htm">Uletema</a><a href="news.htm">News</a></div><center><br /><br /><div class="notice"><div class="tablehead">Notice</div><span style="font-size:13pt;font-weight:bold">Welcome</span><br /><br />Welcome to iyeru42 Designs, home of the Inertia Project. If you wish to see a certain part of the site, please use the top-right navigation. Currently, the <a href="board/index.php">board</a> is online.</div><div class="notice" style="width:800px;text-align:left;margin-top:10px;"><div class="tablehead">Main Content</div>There is nothing really to discuss on the main page yet, please be patient.</div></center></div></center></body></html>

You need to change the #notice and #tablehead in your CSS file into .notice and .tablehead because you cannot reuse IDs. I used a CLASS instead because you will use them more than once.I couldn't replace the <center> tag, so I was forced into Transitional mode to make it valid. I've replaced <font> with CSS. The <img> has width/height for speed and the alt attribute. The script is escaped correctly in case you need to upgrade to true XHTML and I've removed the attribute minimization. Hope this helps,FirefoxRocks

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Why is everyone being so antagonistic?If the member want to use custom tags that don't validate, that use more bandwidth, that don't work in most Browsers, that potentially screw up their pages, that defy current and future standards, that can be easily replaced with valid code... I say let them use them. I'll take the job to repair those sites on an hourly contract...

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FirefoxRocks, when I use that code... IE6 complains a bunch. For one thing:

<script type="text/javascript"><!--//--><![CDATA[//><!--document.write(news);//--><!]]></script>

doesn't show the news box in IE6. And another thing, the wrapper no longer has a BG of white (or doesn't show.)

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Guest FirefoxRocks

Oh yeah, I forgot. I'll bet that content-negotiation is out of the question here. For the <script> problem, use this:

<script type="text/javascript"><!--document.write(news);//--></script>

If that still doesn't work, take out the JavaScript comment tags. They are there to provide support for the older browsers apparently.As for the other problem, I don't know what you are talking about.

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Oh yeah, I forgot. I'll bet that content-negotiation is out of the question here. For the <script> problem, use this:
<script type="text/javascript"><!--document.write(news);//--></script>

If that still doesn't work, take out the JavaScript comment tags. They are there to provide support for the older browsers apparently.As for the other problem, I don't know what you are talking about.

Thanks, it works now. Nevermind about the wrapper, apparently IE6 took out the wrapper because it saw something funny.
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I think that my priorities for my site are:1. Usability2. Valid3. Speed
That reminds me of a saying. I make software that is fast, good, and cheap; pick any 2, you can't have all 3.Also, you can replace this:
<center>  ...</center>

with this:

<div style="text-align: center;">  ...</div>

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Guest FirefoxRocks
That reminds me of a saying. I make software that is fast, good, and cheap; pick any 2, you can't have all 3.Also, you can replace this:
<center>  ...</center>

with this:

<div style="text-align: center;">  ...</div>

If only it was that easy. I have tried putting text-align:center into <html>, <body>, <div> and <table> and the whole <body> element isn't in the center of the <html> element!Look at this site: http://portal.trap17.com/wdl/index.php (it's my site). If you can look into the code (don't worry, I use PHP) and tell me how to get the 779px light blue <body> element in the center of the dark blue <html> then I will be so happy!I have asked this on a few other forums and all I got was:
<body><center>...</center></body>

That isn't what I am looking for though!

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