What should we use?

[mistermartin75]

So, with all this development going on, and the entire W3C web site one unclear mess, what is the best way to go when building a new web site, from scratch?

- HTML 4.01 (Strict or Transitional)
- XHTML 1.0 (Strict or Transitional) [application/xhtml or text/html]
- XHTML 1.1 [application/xhtml or text/html]
- HTML5
- XHTML5 [application/xhtml or text/html]

Because I don't know it anymore...

[anne]

HTML4 strict.

Some people are experimenting with HTML5 already and you can use some of its features already if you want, but coding towards HTML4 strict is probably the safest for now.

[Jarvklo]

... or XHTML 1.0 Strict sent as text/html if you fancy the XML-based syntax.
HTML4 Strict and XHTML 1.0 Strict sent as text/html will (by design!) be handled exactly the same way in HTML 5 and neither is 100% forwards compatible at this point (the only thing that is guaranteed is that HTML5 will be backwards compatible and the issues are not very difficult to handle (and somewhat dependent on coding style), but still)

As long as any code you produce validates you should be equally allright with any of them when the time for migration to HTML5 arrives.