John McSweeney
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May 16, 2008, 10:45 am
Website Design
XHTML
To quote W3C,
"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."
In other words XHTML is an XML application and designers are being asked to take a step towards harnessing the potential of XML by ensuring that their Web documents comply to a set of rules. XML offers possibilities for authoring documents that can be accessed not only by PC-based browsers, but also by other devices, for example PDAs and mobile phones.
XML is a subset of SGML, which has been widely used for producing scientific documents since the 1980s. Unfortunately, SGML is far too complex for web documents. HTML began as a very simple subset of SGML in order to distribute documents to physicists working at CERN. The rest is history, but suffice to say W3C are attempting to enforce new working practices to ensure that the markup of a web document determines its structure and not how it is rendered to the screen. W3C promotes the use of XHTML for structuring web documents, whereas CSS should be responsible for their display. With just a few exceptions, the pages on this website follow this philosophy.
On the next page, I have provided a few guidelines that I have found useful when writing XHTML.
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