W3C released new XHTML draft recommendation

Geneve 01 Dec 99 The W3C consortium has released a new version of the draft XHTML recommendation. It is expected to be accepted as a new standard within two months. XHTML is a reformulation of HTML in XML and is expected to play an important role in distributed environments and applications depending on interoperability.

There are several versions of XHTML, ranging from loose to very strict, The strict definition will be used in the future and for critical applications. In the future also smaller versions of XHTML will be introduced for instance to be used by wireless web browsing.

It is a little bit more difficult to write XHTML than standard HTML. The main reason is that most browsers do a very good job at displaying the intetion of the user. Even when closing tags are not specified or attributes are ommitted, most browser display something which looksmore or less like what one does expect.

Take for instance the <img>-tag in HTML. According to the standard an alt-attribute must be specified with text to be dispayed when the image cannot. Most people do not now, and many do not include this attribute. XHTML is not so forgiven: it insists you specify everything that is required.

Why then use XHTML when HTML is easier? The answer is: "because than it is correct XML". The main advantage of XML documents over HTML documents is that they not only can be used just for display, but also for exchanging information, storing data in databases and many more applications. XML documents are much easier to process by programmes that bad written HTML.

After a short period where people can comment on the new proposed recommendation, the World Wide Web Consortium will put it out as the official XHTML 1.0 release.

Ad Emmen

[News on Advanced IT] [Calendar] [Analysis] [IT in Medicine]