Commercial X-phile

I just fin­ished a client web­site, Smag & Behag — and I’m quite pleased with it. Not because of lay­out, archi­tec­ture or some­thing like that (although it hope­fully isn’t too bad), but because it val­i­dates 100% XHTML 1.0 Strict, sends application/xhtml+xml to con­form­ing user agents and has rea­son­ably semantic/meaningful (fol­low this dis­cus­sion of terms else­where) markup. Head­ers are actu­ally marked with the appro­pri­ate header tags or replaced with graphic through CSS, rollovers are CSS-based as well, the use of DIV and SPAN are kept to a min­i­mum. Evan Goer of goer.org fame has a list of com­pli­ant sites at goer.org: The X-Philes where I just added the site, one of the first com­mer­cial ones. Hope­fully the list will be utterly irrel­e­vant in the near future as I hope more and more sites will take use of web stan­dards. For now, there’s not even a real point (besides “because we can”) in send­ing the proper MIME type, as not all browsers under­stands it and the need for access­ing a fur­ni­ture site through XML must be quite lim­ited. But it seems as if devel­op­ers are slowly start­ing to pay more atten­tion to the seper­a­tion of con­tent and form, to proper markup and to the pos­si­bil­i­ties of CSS, my point being, that once you get the hang of it, there’s noth­ing hard about using CSS — and prac­ti­cally every­thing is pos­si­ble. Now all we need is CMS devel­op­ers and the likes to do their bit… and Microsoft to brush up on their .Net…