I've done a couple of searches on Google and the such and I've come accross a lot of answers. However I thought it would be good to get opinions of users here and it might be a question other users are asking.

So what are the differences between Strict Vs. Transitional XHTML and why would you use one over the other?

It seems like all my pages turn out to be Transitional but I don't know how I go about changing that.

It's really comes down to preference. I prefer strict because the rules are more rigid, and it can be easier to spot a problem with a layout when using strict.

The differences between strict and transitional aren't that great. If you wanted to update your site, and it has valid transitional XHTML, chances are it won't take that long at all. To make them strict, add the proper doctype, and then use an HTML validator to see if you need to change anything.

Correct me if I am wrong... but I believe that Transitional is reserved for old sites using HTML that are being "transitioned" into Strict coding.

yeah.. Transitional has sort of a legacy support. Deprecated tags or attributes might still be valid in transitional, while they will not validate when you use strict.

Strict is used to 'properly' code your website. Ideally you want to separate structure from presentation. This is what the strict doctype is for. You will define your page structure in one file and define your presentation in a separate stylesheet.

Transitional allows you to use formatting tags as well as structural tags. You can do line breaks, bold and other things. Transitional also contains many depreciated tags which will be dropped in the next version of XHTML.

Strict will give you super neat coding and all of your presentation work will be done with CSS. Transitional allows for some flexibility so you can change your appearance via html.

If you are starting out I would recommend starting with the Strict Doctype as this is the future. Transitional is there to really help designers bridge the gap between what they knew previously and writing properly semantic mark up.

Go Strict.

Transitional was only ever intended as a stepping stone towards Strict. Nowadays you should really be using Strict.



Line breaks (<br>) and bold (<b>) are allowed in Strict too. And it's "deprecated". And deprecated code has already been dropped from Strict (X)HTML.



Just change your Doctype.

See my article on doctypes for an analysis of your options.

This post has been edited by MikeHopley: Apr 15 2008, 04:59 AM

Are you using dreamweaver?

If so hit ctrl + N for a new page then in the bottom right corner there should be the different doctypes before you start.

I also use strict coding.

Cool.
Well I'm happy. It seems that I've been learning well.
The first site I worked on had a few validation errors after I changed the doc type. However my newer site validated right away.
Thanks everyone!

strict is based more on css usage, what i mean by that is that, it almost forces you to use styles rather than your whole layout in nothing but html... i think thats what it means

A Seo Man once said to be that Strict is better, because spiders can crawl it easier? I am not to sure.

Superstitious Evidence-free Opinion.

Even if your code is invalid, spiders can crawl it fine -- although if the structure is damaged, they could possibly miss links and blocks of text (potentially everything, if it's a major <div> that's broken).

Spiders will also have a time-out for excessively large pages. A spider would probably not index a 50Mb webpage, for example (not completely, anyway). I've heard speculation of 100kb limits, but again I think that's pure guesswork. I suspect that the limit is high enough such that you would be unlikely to fall foul of it, even if you coded in bloated Transitional.

Strict is better because it forces you to dump some poor coding methods (no more <font>, for a start). That's all.

This post has been edited by MikeHopley: May 11 2008, 05:06 AM