As XHTML 2.0 is obviously not too near on the horizon this article is for discussion and further thinking on forward compatibility and standards.

Others have been having a discussion as to why you should have your site in valid XHTML 1.1 or 1.0 or 1.0.1.1.0 markup, which has not borne any fruit (in my opinion). The critical issue comes down, for now, to pragmatic issues such as time and workflow/CMS. I propose a third, more critical issue: XSLT and forward thinking. IF your site is valid XML (which valid XHTML 1.X is) then you can run an XSLT process on it’s code and you’ll find yourself with a WAP version, or an XHTML Basic version for phones. Or you could run an XSLT process on it and turn your XHTML 1.X site into an XHTML 2.0 site. Or you could turn it into plain text and wrap it with a <pre> tag.

An important reason to keep this set of standards is forward compatibility… not for 2005 but 2010. We need to be pragmatic, make it work now, but also be ready for the future. If Zeldman‘s new book on future compatibility doesn’t say this I’m going to be sad 😉