That is always the issue, isn't it? :)

I certainly don't have access to the Monastery's web logs, but I have found a few things in my web-work:

• XHTML itself is a non-issue for older browsers. It is possible to have a completely valid XHTML 1.0 Strict document render in a 4th gen. browser. It's the CSS which is funky.
• There *is* a subset of CSS that works acceptably in the 4th gen browsers
• I would hypothesize (and i could be treading on thin ice here) that given the technical audience, the proportion of users with more modern browsers is probably significantly higher than the general web audience.
• I know that the Perl community tends to avoid political statements, but there are ways to let older browsers down more gently.

I may post more completely later. I'm off on a road trip :P

Update (2002/02/26 8:55 AM EST): picking up where I left off

I'd argue that it is more a question of when rather than of why at this point, as most monks fluent in the web these days understand that such a transition would be a good thing. But do you wait until only 10% of your audience uses a 4th gen browser? 2%? That's vroom's call no doubt, but I'd like to encourage the Monastery to make the transition sooner rather than later.

As a transition, though I'll admit readily enough that I don't know how the site works, but it might be possible to make the xhtml/css optional by making it it's own theme. I don't know how flexible theming is though. As a theme people could choose whether or not to use it, and then go on to use the new CSS support Petruchio announced recently to style it any way they see fit.