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Jay — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 13:14:14 +0000

Design
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Why is xHTML needed? Isn’t HTML good enough?

Jay — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 12:59:39 +0000

HTML is probably the most successful document markup language in the world. But when XML was introduced, a two-day workshop was organised to discuss whether a new version of HTML in XML was needed. The opinion at the workshop was a clear ‘Yes’: with an XML-based HTML other XML languages could include bits of XHTML, and XHTML documents could include bits of other markup languages. We could also take advantage of the redesign to clean up some of the more untidy parts of HTML, and add some new needed functionality, like better forms.

What are the advantages of using XHTML rather than HTML?

If your document is just pure XHTML 1.0 (not including other markup languages) then you will not yet notice much difference. However as more and more XML tools become available, such as XSLT for tranforming documents, you will start noticing the advantages of using XHTML. XForms for instance will allow you to edit XHTML documents (or any other sort of XML document) in simple controllable ways. Semantic Web applications will be able to take advantage of XHTML documents.

What is xHTML?

Jay — Sat, 16 Oct 2010 12:09:13 +0000

XHTML is a family of current and future document types and modules that reproduce, subset, and extend HTML 4 . XHTML family document types are xml based, and ultimately are designed to work in conjunction with XML-based user agents. The details of this family and its evolution are discussed in more detail in .

XHTML 1.0 (this specification) is the first document type in the XHTML family. It is a reformulation of the three HTML 4 document types as applications of XML 1.0 . It is intended to be used as a language for content that is both XML-conforming and, if some simple guidelines are followed, operates in HTML 4 conforming user agents. Developers who migrate their content to XHTML 1.0 will realize the following benefits:

XHTML documents are XML conforming. As such, they are readily viewed, edited, and validated with standard XML tools.
XHTML documents can be written to operate as well or better than they did before in existing HTML 4-conforming user agents as well as in new, XHTML 1.0 conforming user agents.
XHTML documents can utilize applications (e.g. scripts and applets) that rely upon either the HTML Document Object Model or the XML Document Object Model.
As the XHTML family evolves, documents conforming to XHTML 1.0 will be more likely to interoperate within and among various XHTML environments.

The XHTML family is the next step in the evolution of the Internet. By migrating to XHTML today, content developers can enter the XML world with all of its attendant benefits, while still remaining confident in their content’s backward and future compatibility.

XHTML Benefits

XHTML documents
are backward compatible with older, non-XHTML compliant web browsers. Instead of sloppy HTML tags, your pages will now contain XML tags that are always properly closed and nested correctly, such as:

This is some text

Instead of:

This is some text

You can see that the XHTML version of the code above has a

, , and then a tag. These tags are closed in the reverse order that they were created in: , , and lastly

. All tags must be closed in this way for the XHTML document to be considered valid.

Also, notice the
tags? Because of the way non-XHTML browsers are designed, as long as you leave a space between the beginning of the tag and the “/>”, then they will just treat the tag normally, and ignore the forward-slash.