ayg wrote:

Per my recollection of previous comments by Brion in various places, which I agree with, MediaWiki will not move to a Strict DTD at any time in the foreseeable future. While we work to minimize the amount of inline style and otherwise separate presentation and structure, XHTML Strict takes this to an unreasonable extreme by removing useful elements such as <i> and <b> that would realistically have to be replaced by <span class="italic"> and similar (since in many cases bold/italics do *not* indicate emphasis of any kind). There is, on the other hand, absolutely no advantage to switching other than if you're a standards junkie: no new functionality will be made possible, it will be wasted effort. Something like HTML 5 is much more interesting to look forward to switching to.

oldakquill wrote:

Wouldn't keeping a stricter separation between presentation and structure (inc. <span class="italic"> instead of <i>) make MediaWiki more flexible in serving to mobile devices? Also, wouldn't replacing <i>, <b>, &c. with span classes make styling more flexible for the user?

ayg wrote:

Um, no. How? If <i> is mapped exactly to <span class="italic">, they work the same as far as flexibility and styling. Just replace all "i"'s in selectors, etc. with "span.italic", or vice versa. They're identical.