a grand summary of markup wankery

Mark Pilgrim tells the truth about various Web buzzwords. Among other things, he explains the reason why I haven't bothered converting most of my classic Web site to XHTML, though I did convert the front page as a lark. For nearly all of today's purposes, XHTML and HTML 4 are six of one, half a dozen of the other. The only reason I use XHTML here is that LiveJournal seems to want us to-- at least, they put the self-closing thingies in BR elements and such, so you don't have a prayer of validating if you don't use XHTML, whereas if you do it's merely highly unlikely.

His statement that validation and CSS are independent isn't quite true: sites that use a lot of CSS tend to blow up in various browsers more often if they don't have some approximation of valid markup. That's true even for crappy old Netscape 4, believe it or not.