As announced on xml-dev, Wired News site has celebrated their sixth birthday in a high tech fashion by launching a version which should have been compliant with the W3C recommendations, including XHTML and CSS.

To reach this target, Wired News has taken the risk of removing all the layout tables - considered bad practice and harmful for accessibility - and relying on CSS positioning features, accepting that their content will be displayed in a degraded form by browsers which do not support these features (such as Internet Explorer 5.x, Netscape 4.7 and their earlier releases) by an audience estimated as 14% of the visitors.

The benefits are pages with a smaller size whose structure is simpler, making them faster to load, easier to maintain, and more conformant to the accessibility guidelines.

But people who have tried the Wired News home page against the W3C XHTML validator have spoiled the happiness of Wired News developers: the pages are not well formed XML and couldn't be read by a XML parser!

The reason given for this is that the elements added for the advertisements (over which Wired News has no control) are not well formed XML.

Anyway, this is a good illustration of the difficulties to produce well formed XML in real world applications 4.5 years after XML 1.0 has been published as a recommendation.

Other stories:

• XHTML 2.0 surfaces
• WaSP to Microsoft: Nice work, now finish the job!