Thanks to a little help from Zeldman and liberal use of the w3c XHTML validator, this site is finally XHTML Transitional.

The most uncomfortable part of switching to XHTML (in theory as well as practice) was changing the ampersand-separators in URL HREFs from & to &, thereby changing the URL’s physical location and trusting that all browsers going forward will properly translate this. Even scarier in a Microsoft-dominated world — who knows what they’ll do with standards in coming years. Nevertheless, it was a leap of faith that made me more uncomfortable than I’d like.

The other pesky item: what to do with image alt tags that are soley for aesthetics that have no accessibility value (such as the dividers between the buttons on the top nav of this page). Why must they contain an alt tag, other than for zen-of-perfection reasons to get the designer in the good habit of including them with every image and button? I’ve left them as empty quotes, which Lynx seems to ignore. Otherwise it’s just extra noise for text-only readers.

Other than these minor points, the arguments I’ve read from web standards folks for XHTML & CSS generated sites are overwhelming — the general shift towards XML, the ability to keep content separate from markup code and the bandwidth savings that results from the cached CSS, increased accessibility, wider interoperability of browsers and web devices — there’s really no reason not to make the leap.