Jeff Croft suggests that XHTML is not a structural layer at all, but rather a presentational layer when considered in the grand scheme of things:
In short, I’m suggesting that the (X)HTML templates used for a website in today’s modern world are much more closely related to presentation than they are to content. Why? Because (X)HTML templates are only one of many ways the content of a modern website is presented. It may also be presented as RSS. Or as a PDF. Or within a Flash context. Or sent as an e-mail. Or exposed as JSON in a REST API.
But, you say: (X)HTML markup gives it structure! I say: Not really. The structured content layer (i.e. database) layer gives it structure. That structure may be replicated in your (X)HTML templates or RSS feed, but the database is the place where the structure begins.
A tempting theory, isn't it? In the grand flow of data from the spring-fed source to the ever-thirsty consumer, XHTML is really just one of those final presentational steps. The implications are impressive: no more worrying about element consistency, or hierarchy, or feeling guilty about all those extra elements you've had to use to get it to style properly—it's presentational, so just present it.
But there's an unhealthy marriage holding this theory together. The marriage is performed as Croft laments the lack of attention paid to the server side by standards zealots:
Web Standards advocates tend to only talk about the front end of web sites and app. They tend to completely ignore the back-end. This bothers me.
There's a very good reason for this: your server is not a part of the World Wide Web. Yes, it sends, receives, and forwards HTTP packets, and yes, it generates the content and documents that make up the web (and a fine job it does in doing so), but it's not a part of the web itself. There are no W3C standard specifications instructing your web server software how to work. There are best practices (and worst practices), to be sure, but how you generate your content is entirely up to you. You can store your data in a structured relational database, or in a flat text file, or on a tape drive if you like: the web doesn't care.
Which is why we have to look at XHTML separately from the server-side process: because it makes its appearance when the web does care. At the XHTML stage, you've left the private realm of your server, and entered the public realm of the web. Now you're being judged by web standards, and web standards say that your XHTML document should be structural in nature—because XML is all the structure that the web has. Not what your server has, not what your database has, but what the web has. XHTML is far from a perfect format for marking up documents, and its presentational HTML roots are often painfully obvious, but it's the best document structure spec that the web has to work with.
And if the web didn't need document structure at the content-consumption level, I'd be a Flash developer.
So when looking at the server-to-client–side process of web page generation, XHTML definitely stands out as the weakest structural platform. But it's the only structural platform in that process that's actually a part of the World Wide Web, so it'll have to do as such.
If one publishes the half-finished site, does that give one more incentive to make it a finished site?
I'll let you know.
Too long ago, in an effort to get this site started by any means necessary—in this case, putting words before design—I wrote this:
The modern domain name economy necessitates some creativity when it comes to online self-identification. My earliest memories of any queues comes from the Royal Bank in the small Ottawa valley town in which I grew up. The place was built for them. Spacious floors in front of the tellers were the natural place for the line-ups which grew along the velvet ropes as vines on creepers. People fidgeted, looked at their watches, re-read their bank slips, frowned at their passbook, and generally appeared somewhat impatient and just a little agitated, but through the whole crowd was settled a certain calm of propriety, a comfortable knowledge that this was the natural formation of things and that sometimes you just had to wait your turn. Fascinating psychoanalysis for a three-year old. The stone steps, mammoth pillars, and lion crest underscored the magnitude of the financial abstract, and the tradition of the queue.
But not even stone and pillars can preserve things forever. Change is inevitable, and for some reason, uncomphrehensible and uninteresting to my toddler mind, my parents switched to the other bank in town: the Scotia, next door. Modern building, clean lines, lots of glass, newer-looking pens with which to scribble on the back of withdrawal forms. But everything took place in the same form: the queue. The same people, the same impatience, the same natural acceptance. The design was drastically different, but just as effective as the one next door.
Why'd I write that? Privately, to convince myself to let go of the original idea for this site, which I'd been kicking around for more than a couple of years. Publically, to try to explain the domain name, another task I've long since given up on, especially when dictating contact information over the phone.
In the meantime, though, the long, long lineup of designs for this site which were conceived and tossed aside will do just enough to preserve the branding concept created by the domain name.
For me, anyway. You should just ignore the domain name and carry on.