Ever wondered what the hell the major difference between XHTML 1.0 and XHTML 1.1 is?

Never you mind those Transitional, Strict and Frameset DTDs for XHTML 1.0, but let’s consider these two version numbers. What made the dudes at W3C devise XHTML 1.1?

I was just Googling ‘xhtml 1.0 +or 1.1′ a couple minutes ago and found something interesting. In that forum post, scroll down to the final post (by ergophobe). The major difference is that XHTML 1.1 is so tied into XML that it requires the XML prolog to be declared before its DTD:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" standalone="yes"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en-us">
<!-- Stuff that I don't need to mention -->
</html>

The problem? IE6 switches to quirks mode when it sees that the doctype is either missing or elsewhere. As long as it’s not in the first line of an HTML document it goes nuts.

And that means it will pathetically break my IE6 box-expanding bug fix because it requires IE to be in standards (ha) mode.

The verdict? I’m glad I stuck to XHTML 1.0 all this while so NOVALISTIC will continue to display a bit more sanely even in IE6.