Introduction to XHTML
HTML has evolved..it is now XHTML. There are several key differences between HTML and XHTML such as tags must be closed, attributes must be lower case, and more. XHTML is NOT a separate language from HTML, but the next phase of HTML.
This tutorial focuses on:
- What you should already know
- What is XHTML?
- HTML to XHTML
- Support for XHTML
What you should already know
Before studying XHTML, you should at the very least have a basic understanding of HTML and webpage building.
If you are not familiar with HTML or you need to brush up on your HTML skills, read the tutorials at our HTML tutorials section or check out our first webpage guide section for a quick overview of webpage building.
What is XHTML?
XHTML is a web language used to write webpages. With XHTML, you decide where to arrange text and graphics on web pages as well as their structure and layout. XHTML is designed to specify the logical organization of a webpage.
XHTML stands for Extensible Hyper Text Markup Language. It is the next phase in the evolution of HTML. The last version of HTML before XHTML was HTML 4.01. The first version of XHTML was XHTML 1.0, and the current version of XHTML is XHTML 1.1. XHTML is alot like HTML, in fact the same tags are used in XHTML that are used in HTML. Fundamentally, XHTML is HTML with a stricter syntax and standards for cleaner and more efficient code. While it has not done so yet, XHTML is aimed to eventually replace HTML.
XHTML documents have a file extension of .htm or .html. It is better to use the .html extension as that is the modern standard.
NOTE: XHTML is a W3C Recommendation.
NOTE:Technically, it should be called EHTML (Extensible Hyper Text Markup Language), but XHTML sounds alot cooler, don't you think?
Learning XHTML will help you write cleaner more efficient HTML code that is up to modern standards and will validate with a webpage validator.
HTML to XHTML
How do you go about converting an HTML document to an XHTML document?
To do so basically requires cleaning up code to adhere to some standards.
To learn in detail about converting an HTML document to an XHTML document, read our HTML to XHTML conversion page.
Support for XHTML
XHTML first become a W3C recommendation in January of 2000. It has been a while since then, and by now all new browsers support XHTML.
