HOW+TO+Page+Group+14

Group 14 HTML to XHTML How to: Jason McCreary (how to leader) Toddrick Manning

The differences Between [|HTML] 4 and [|XHTML]
HTML is set to be the next step in the evolution of HTML. XHTML or "eXtensible Hyper Text Mark-up Language" is very similar to the latest version of HTML (4.0) To quote Jennifer Kyrnin of About.com "XHTML is HTML 4.0 Written in XML Format". She also writes "XML is an extensible markup language that was developed to retain the flexibility and power of HTML while reducing most of the complexity. XHTML combines the flexibility of HTML with the extensibility of XML." The "extensible" part means it can be "extended" with the addition of new tags.

Some of the Diffrences Between HTML 4 and XHTML follow.

All tags must now be closed
becomes

becomes ... becomes ...  ... becomes ...  becomes  or ... becomes 

Tags must not have missing elements
tags must include alt="image description" to be correct

Tags cannot rely on defaults
correct: Incorrect:

Tags cannot over lap
hello  is incorrect hello is correct

All tag attributes must be in quotes


Elements (required)
Documents (pages) must be well formed. example: elements cannot overlap. There are no explicit values of any kind They must contain a DOCTYPE statement at the top