XHTML Compliant - Thrice!

I tried validating the markup and my site and found a few errors (nobr tag not allowed, span tag not allowed inside a ul and few others) so I fixed them and I’m XHTML 1.1 compliant once again. That is the home page and a few random pages I tried are compliant. There are probably some posts with random stuff that isn’t…

The main reason I did it was for the sake of any mobile browsers that might complain really loudly about bad markup. So I started reading about XHTML Basic what exactly was and wasn’t allowed. Well I couldn’t find anything useful so I just tried validating as XHTML Basic 1.0. I had to remove script tags, style attributes, replace i with em and again, a few other minor things. The end result is that an XHTML Basic version of the site is available to mobile browsers. Since I don’t have a mobile browser to test it on I can’t guarantee I’m detecting them properly yet. If you want to see what it looks like though, just go to Oliver Brown - Basic.

Then I discovered that it’s mainly PDAs that use XHTML Basic and that mobile phones tend to want XHTML Mobile Profile (XHTML MP also called WAP 2.0). Just changing the doctype was enough to get XHTML Basic to validate as XHTML MP. You can check it out at Oliver Brown - Mobile (it looks the same as Basic).

Just to let you know, when browsing the other versions manually all the links bring you back to the normal site - you actually need a browser detected as being a mobile phone for it to work properly.