Since 1990 HTML or Hyper Text Markup Language has been the
language recommended for writing Web pages in. And it has been
very successful (you didn't need me to tell you that). But HTML
has its problems. Without going into specifics, as it's not the
subject of this article, HTML has become a mess. To sort this
mess out the World Wide Web Consortium, the standards body
for the Web, came up with XHTML in 1999. XHTML stands for
eXtensible Hyper Text Markup Language and is written in a
language called XML or eXtensible Markup Language. As the
name implies XHTML has the capability of being extended. You
can use extra modules to do things with your pages that weren't
possible with HTML. The long-term goal is that your Web pages
will be able to be understood by computers as well as humans.
If this doesn't make sense, allow me to explain. You may be
thinking that computers already understand Web pages
because you use a computer to view them. This is true. But
computers only understand how to display your pages, not
what they mean. Imagine if computers understood what they
meant, you could tell your computer to go and visit all of your
local supermarket's Web sites and tell you which one is the
cheapest for this weeks shopping. Your computer could visit
the news sites around the world and bring back the latest
headlines that relate to things you are interested in. The
possibilities are endless. Hopefully you now see why XHTML
is important. I decided to write this tutorial to teach you XHTML
from scratch. The main reason for this is that I couldn't find a
beginners XHTML tutorial anywhere, there are plenty of HTML
beginner's articles, and plenty of XHTML introductions for those
who can already do HTML, but it seems logical to me that if you
are starting learning Web Design now then you might as well
use XHTML from the word go. So if you're still with me, go.
Jack Menon

Article written by Jack Menon.