Web Design & Development

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XHTML compared to HTML

XHTML is a standard that ensures your code is clean, error free, and symantically correct. There have been a number of standards created over the years for HTML but the latest standard is XHTML, which applies to both HTML documents and also XML documents. There are only a few differences from HTML 4.0, and it is strictly in the syntax (most elements, attributes and values have not changed). Here is the difference in XHTML 1.0 from the old HTML 4.0:

  1. HTML, head and body elements, and document definition type (DTD) are required on all pages something like this:

    <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
    <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
    <head>
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
    <title>Untitled Document</title>
    </head>

    <body>
    Body text goes here.
    </body>
    </html>

  2. Every element must have closing tags, even empty ones
  3. All attribute values must have quotes around them
  4. All elements, attributes, and predefined values must be in lowercase
  5. All values must be stated explicitly