Schewanick Computer Services

XHTML or the Extensible Hypertext Markup Language is an extension to HTML made by the w3c. XHTML is a cleaner, neater, generally faster version of HTML. Here are some things you cannot do with XHTML: Dreamweaver, Frontpage, etc. GOODBYE!!! Never use them agian, they are cheap, they are not coding, you are NOT a webmaster just becuase you can make a frontpage website. Also remember these simple things: Tags must close in the order that they open:

Hello

is not valid where as

Hello

is. All tags must close, including line breaks (now
), horizontal rules (now ), and images (now ) The alt is NEEDED. Most imporantly a doctype is needed and a character encoding is recommended. There are three types of doctypes: Transitional: Most used, most friendly, doctype.

PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"">http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

Frames -For using frames, duh

PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Frameset//EN"
"">http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-frameset.dtd">

And Strict, the mean, scrict XHTML

PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"">http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

The most common character encoding is as follows,



A full list of character encodings can be found at www.w3c.org. Also in XHTML tables for layout are a big no-no. Yet most of the time the validator lets you slide with them anyway. Use CSS for layout if you want true XHTML.

About the Author
Abe Smith is the owner of the webmaster forum (www.webmasterforum.tk) and enjoys writing various web Programming Tutorials, articles on SEO, and computer security.