Differences between HTML & XHTML

[alena123]

fantastic.......

[aathuls]

HTML, is an application of SGML.XHTML, is an application of XML.It provides a shorthand notation for empty elements.HTML allows an author to omit certain tags and use attribute minimization. .

[gkumar]

The differences are actually pretty minor. xHTML is basically more correct and more strict interpretation of HTML. HTML 4.0 allows designers to be rather sloppy with how the tags are written, which results in some browsers interpreting things radically different. While they can still display some things differently with xHTML of course, it's just an effort for things to be more standard and more correct. Here is a list of some of the differences between the two. And another article that also describes the different doctypes such as strict and transitional, which will change how the browser renders the xHTML.



If you are re-learning HTML it's a good idea to just go ahead and code to the more strict standards of xHTML in my opinion. It is backwards compatible with HTML 4 and there is no reason to avoid using the better and more correct standard. Using one won't give you any extra features over the other, except for horrible things like the < blink> tag being removed from xHTML.



Another thing that ties into xHTML is the web standards project, which is a major effort started a few years ago to get designers to markup their web pages in a standard way across all web sites. Previously when the internet first began you'd frequently see an Internet Explorer version and a Netscape version, due to the major differences between how the two interpreted the HTML. It's also a collection of best-practices to allow web pages to be more accessible to people with disabilities, to be more friendly to search engines, and just all around better. It also encourages the separation of presentation from structure. For example you wouldn't want to define the colors you use for a table or a font color in the xHTML itself, you would want to do that in the CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) document. Another advantage of this is that you can update a single CSS document that you use for your entire site, and those changes will immediately take effect for everywhere that particular style is used in your entire site. So rather than the old way of having to change every < FONT> tag on hundreds of pages to change the font size you want to use for your site, you can simply change one line in your CSS file and update hundreds or thousands of pages that your site contains.



dHTML simply stands for dynamic HTML and is kind of an out-of-date term to describe the combination of HTML and Javascript. These days you'll see the term AJAX (asynchronous Javascript and XML) used a lot more often, which is also a combination of xHTML, Javascript, CSS, and XML. AJAX allows you to update a portion of the page without reloading the entire page. The terms are slightly different but still have a bit of overlap. You'll see this technique used a lot here on Askville. Such as when you click to insert an image or link in a browser, or when you click on My Askville and notice all the little boxes along the right hand siding loading individually even after the main page has already loaded.