Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

Jan 25, 2000

Posted to MuniMall Newsletter, 26 January 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.



Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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