[WEB4LIB] XHTML 1.0

[Thomas Dowling]

> XHTML (The Extensible HyperText Markup Language) has been released as a
> W3C Recommendation. The subitle of the page at:
>
> http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/
>
> says "A Reformulation of HTML 4 in XML 1.0". More specifically, "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." Am I going to run out and start coding XHTML documents?
No,
> not yet. Am I going to watch it with interest, until I become bored or
> have better things to do? Yep. I'd be interested to know what other,
more
> perceptive, Web4Lib readers think. Thanks,
> Roy Tennant

Even for purposes of watching with interest, one of your starting points
should be the section on differences from HTML 4.0
<URL:http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/#diffs>.  XML can be made very similar to
HTML, but not identical.  Notably, XML element names are case sensitive,
and the recommendation for XHTML makes all the element names lower-case
(<H1> is not a valid element name).  Also, XML requires end tags for all
elements, including elements where it's optional in HTML (e.g. <p>) and
empty elements (<br></br> or <br /> instead of just <br>).  All attributes
must have a value (<input checked> becomes <input checked="checked">), and
all attribute values must be quoted.  Also, the trick of enclosing the
contents of scripts and stylesheets in <!-- --> comments requires a
different workaround.

Three or four years out, it's entirely possible that the Web will have be
predominantly marked up in XML, and we'll all have a strong suite of XML
browsers, editors, and search engines, and XHTML will make sense because
support will be built into all those tools.  For now, though, I agree with
Roy that there's no compelling reason to use it.


Thomas Dowling
OhioLINK - Ohio Library and Information Network
tdowling at ohiolink.edu