Why Switch to XHTML? Why Switch to XHTML? Lee Underwood
For Web developers, the learning process never seems to end. New technologies are constantly being developed; the manipulation of multimedia seems to know no bounds; the proliferation of knowledge, distribution, and programming languages continues to develop and grow; and, of course, design standards are constantly being upgraded in an effort to keep up with it all.
The coding of Web pages is one place where the learning appears endless. Depending upon how long you've been coding, you may have gone through a few "upgrades" of HTML, culminating in version 4.01. These "upgrades" are a part of the standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in an effort to develop common protocols to ensure the continued interoperability of the World Wide Web.
The latest version of HTML is 4.01, which was a minor update of 4.0, and was released in December, 1999. However, it's not the current standard for coding web pages, according to the W3C. The new standard (or "upgrade") is XHTML 1.0, released January 2000, and revised in August 2002.
What is XHTML?
According to the W3C, "XHTML 1.0 is a reformulation of HTML 4.01 in XML, and combines the strength of HTML 4 with the power of XML." This means that, by using XHTML, you are adding the potential of the power of XML to your web pages. A discussion of XML is outside the scope of this article, but there are many resources to further your study on the subject (just what you need, something else to study). But if all this sounds rather complicated, it really isn't.
Basically, XHTML boils down to strict HTML. In the past, it was possible to get away with a lot of sloppy coding. That now changes under XHTML. For example:
a doctype indicator must be included in all documents
tag names must be in lowercase
all documents must be properly structured
all tags must be properly nested
all tags must be closed
all attributes must be quoted
the <title> tag must come first in the <head> tag.
