“Standards body the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) today
released a proposed recommendation–the penultimate stage in the
W3C recommendation process–of Extensible Hypertext Markup Language
(XHTML). The proposed recommendation would rewrite Hypertext
Markup Language (HTML), commonly referred to as the Web’s
lingua franca, in Extensible Markup Language (XML), a newer
technology for creating Web languages.”
“High on the list of goals for XHTML is to make Web pages more
easily readable by devices other than the traditional desktop
browser, as devices such as handheld computers become
ever-more-connected to the Internet. XHTML divides elements of a
Web page into groups called “modules.” When a device with a small
screen accesses the page, the server can choose to send the device
only the module with information that will fit on that small
screen.”
“Part of the trouble with today’s HTML is that it grants Web
coders too much leeway with their tagging. For example, Web authors
designate paragraph breaks with a paragraph tag (
), but tagging the end of a paragraph with a close paragraph tag
(
) is optional. XHTML would eliminate that kind of ambiguity. Also,
current HTML is not case-sensitive, but XHTML would be.”
