XHTML - Transitional or Strict?

[TcM]

Ok I have an assigment, and I'm making it XHTML Strict 1.0, but the validator validates it as even transitional valid. So I say.. what is the actual difference between the two?

[v0id]

Strict is more strict than transitional, when it comes to different tags, etc. Transitional supports some of the old stuff from HTML 3.2 - 4.1, while they're removed when using strict.
In generally, you can say that everything which works in strict will work in transitional, but everything which works in transitional will not work in strict.

An example could be the U-tag. It's not supported in strict, but supported in transitional.

<!-- This work with a transitional doctype, -->
<!-- but not with a strict doctype. -->
<u>Hello, World!</u>

[Death Slaught]

Use this validator The W3C Markup Validation Service. It's made by the W3C themselves.


- Death

[TcM]

Yeah, I used that to validate my project.

Thanks for the validation, so transitional is more 'tolerant'

[Fjeddy]

I think of it more as a way to ease oldtimers with HTML into XHTML. W3schools has a list of tags and that shows which tags are deprecated and not.

[url]http://www.w3schools.com/tags/default.asp[url]

To the right in the list there is a row called "DTD" this shows which Doctype Definition the tag works in:

S - Strict
T - Transitional
F - Frameset

As you might notice those that only work in "T" and "F" are "Deprecated", these are to be avoided, since they will be removed totally in the future. Most of the deprecated ones are tags that are used to format text or similar things that should be done with CSS.

Also, this is a nobrainer really, but did you declare the correct Doctype Definition?

[TcM]

Yeah of course I did declare it as strict, but when I changed the doctype from Strict 1.0 to Transitional 1.0 it still showed no errors.