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Abstract: The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) promulgates the HTML standards used on the Web, but it has no authority to enforce the adoption of one standard in favor of another. In this environment, developers have some incentive to ignore up-to-date W3C standards given that the transitional versions of HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0 offer most of the capabilities of the newer ones but are less stringent in their requirements. If most Web sites migrate to these "transitional" standards and remain there, future versions might be mere academic exercises for the W3C.
http://dsonline.computer.org/portal/site/dsonline/menuitem.9ed3d9924aeb0dcd82ccc6716bbe36ec/index.jsp?&pName=dso_level1&path=dsonline/2008/04&file=w2std.xml&xsl=article.xsl&;jsessionid=LLV9NWYTTRvyTGh82mhPL1gz8sc2JmbL5QkLtCVbQtkd8hXBlZlw!692457680
Hi marbux,
Good catch! I was surprised at how strong the uptake of transitional XHTML is. What concerns me most though is the pending influx onto the Web of billions of complex MSOffice documents rich in business process, workgroup and workflow.
These MSOffice documents will not be coming to the Open Web as a version of XHTML or HTML. Instead they will appear as XAML documents courtesy of the MSOffice SDK OOXML <> XAML conversion component.
Funny, but XAML was not covered in the survey :) I wonder if the survey instruments will ever be able to penetrate the MS Web-Stack firewall?
I left an extensive comment on the survey web page.
~ge~
I thought it even more interesting that "No Doctype" came in a very close second. If DTDs aren't being identified on that proportion of web pages, I suspect that really says something about how far the browser developers have pushed "quirks mode." Ponder how much better browsers might be if the development resources plowed into parsing malformed web documents had gone instead into other development work.
Do apps conform to standards or do apps aim for elasticity in data format processing? It seems that the message is clearly the latter, which may say something about why so many standards are being developed that are themselves elastic, standards in name only.
BTW, I see the URL I left got chopped by Diigo because of its length. Here is a condensed version. http://tinyurl.com/67vkww
Also, I didn't see your comment on that web page. Is it being delayed by moderation? I didn't see any option to add comments.
marbux 
Gary Edwards