And it’s the same markup.

It is worth using XHTML, even if it’s only error-handled HTML for some browsers, because for other browsers it can be used as XML.

And even where it’s only HTML, namespaced information can still be set and extracted programatically (albeit in a mangled way); as a principle, that appears to be working nicely for ARIA, don’t see why it couldn’t work for UF too. And even if the bottom line is semantic information that IE can’t use, I still think that’s better than what’s happening now.

The whole point though is that maybe if more people did use ‘pretend XHTML’, it would cause the browser manufacturers to but proper XHTML support higher up on their priority list, so it isn’t entirely useless.

Why would they? Pretend-XHTML doesn’t benefit from XHTML support, since it’s HTML.

Just look at the millions of pretend-XHTML sites on the ‘Net today. They don’t seem to have swayed Microsoft into making an effort, have they?

Now, if lots of important sites were to use real XHTML, thus barring IE users from access, that might provide an incentive for Mr Ballmer et al. But of course that’s not going to happen. Catch-22. Chicken and egg.

How would that help, you’re not using any XML features so the browser vendors would carry on as normal. If people used proper XHTML as XML then maybe that would have changed things, but due to IE and the excessive XML error handling people won’t go near proper XHTML.

The whole point though is that maybe if more people did use ‘pretend XHTML’, it would cause the browser manufacturers to but proper XHTML support higher up on their priority list, so it isn’t entirely useless.

However people are free to use true XHTML as XML, but they don’t because IE can’t handle it (not to mention the error handling).

Pretend-XHTML is just invalid HTML, and HTML doesn’t support namespaces. If, instead of using pretend-XHTML, authors had put pressure on browser vendors (one in particular, you know who) to support real XHTML, then we might have been able to use XML namespaces by now.

Anyway, isn’t it a bit ironic that proponents of microformats (who claim to care about semantics) so blatantly disregard semantics in abusing abbr this way?