Jan 25, 2000
Building a community website? Better get ready to learn a new language: XHTML.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) today released its recommendation for 'eXtensible HyperText Mark-up Language', XHTML version 1.0.
XHTML is being touted as the next phase of web page design because it enables the possibility of device-independent access. This means that the same web page may be viewed through a web browser, a wireless PDA, or a web page reader for the blind.
XHTML is essentially a combination of HTML 4.0 with another W3C specification, eXtensible Markup Language (XML). XML enables information to be represented structurally - for example, a book may use XML elements to represent sections, chapters and paragraphs.
The W3C is encouraging the transfer to XHTML compliance by providing a set of tools for web page editing and design. A program called "Tidy" helps Web authors convert ordinary HTML documents into XHTML.
XHTML documents will continue to work with current browsers.
The new XHTML specification has broad industry support.
