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XHTML For Beginners
This article is for readers who have either no prior experience of Web Design or very little. If you have dabbled with exporting HTML from Microsoft Word, or played around with FrontPage a little and want to understand what you are doing then this article is for you. I will teach you what XHTML is and how you can use it to start producing the next generation of Web pages.
Nigel Peck
Nigel Peck is the founder and Managing Director of MIS Web Design. The company provides a complete range of services to businesses... read his profile »
Article Index
- Introduction,
- Hello World,
- XHTML Building Blocks,
- Text That Says Something,
- Advanced XHTML Building Blocks,
- Text That Says Something 2
Introduction
This article is for readers who have either no prior experience of Web Design or very little. If you have dabbled with exporting HTML from Microsoft Word, or played around with FrontPage a little and want to understand what you are doing then this article is for you. I will teach you what XHTML is and how you can use it to start producing the next generation of Web pages.
Color
I have used colour in the example XHTML throughout this article to make it easier for you to understand the code. The colour is purely there for this reason and serves no other purpose.
Why XHTML?
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.
Continue reading next Hello World »
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