I don’t know why it took me this long to realize this. I’ve been writing xhtml for a couple years now, and around the same time I started playing with xsl stylesheets, but it just occurred to me in a real way that I can probably use xslt to transform my xhtml pages (at my business site, for instance) into forms more useful to other devices. Cell phones and PDAs, for instance.

It probably took me so long because XHTML looks so much like HTML to me, that it didn’t completely sink in that it is truly XML. Yet it is, namespaces and all.

Now that I realize this, I appreciate even more it’s role as an intermediary between html and xml. XHTML doesn’t need xsl to transform it or style it. It is so close to real html that even older browsers can handle it fine, and it works very smoothly with css as is.

So, this realization basically just means that making my site more available on handhelds is even easier than I first thought. Granted, I haven’t gotten into the sticky details of it all yet…