When I introduced a beta of this site on 10/1, one of the technology decisions I had to make was whether I could make the leap to XHTML and CSS. XHTML is just HTML cleaned up and recast as an XML “application”. (Don’t let the word “application” put you off. If you look at the source of this page, it’ll look very familiar.) CSS is Cascading Style Sheets, a much better way of handling formatting and layout than FONT and TABLE. Using XHTML and CSS would make the site more accessible, allow me to to do my tiny part to move the web to modern standards, and save myself a lot of work. So, I made the leap.
On 10/11, Wired News unveiled a redesign that uses XHTML and CSS. Although Wired News attacts a tiny fraction of the readers that sites like Yahoo! and Amazon do, its adoption of modern web standards is an important milestone.
This site has attracted several hundred regular readers in its first two weeks — I’m happy to report that so far, the use of XHTML and CSS has been a non-issue. With the Wired News news it certainly feels like the inflection point for XHTML and CSS is here, and I recommend investigating it for your sites and the sites you create.