[html5] 4.01 vs XHTML

[Bjartur Thorlacius]

David Osborne wrote:
>
> If I am writing in Html 4.01... is this really bad...??
> When I put in the declaration of which type of HTML - 4.01 transitional
> show how old my software is...?
HTML 4.01 is fine if you don't need any of the new features of HTML 5.

> What disadvantages am I exposing myself to...
>
Most importantly, not using elements such as <nav> may make your site 
less accessible. Accessibility is more involved than just changing DOCTYPEs.

> XHTML - what is the difference between it and html 4.01??
>
There are slight syntactical and extensibility differences. If you don't 
need the extensibility of XHTML (which you probably can't quite leverage 
anyway), you should probably stick with HTML. The WHATWG is essentially 
deprecating XHTML for most purposes.

XHTML is still useful inside XML documents, for example. But stand-alone 
XHTML is not recommended.