Web Design & Development
[ Web Design & Development Topics ]
HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is the predominant and historical markup language for web pages. It provides a means to create structured documents by denoting structural semantics for text such as headings, paragraphs, lists, links, quotes and other items.
The other cool thing about HTML (and XHTML) is that it permits text to be linked to other files on the Internet (known as "hyperlinks") so when the user clicks on the link they are brought to the other document. The ability to hyperlink is a large part of what makes XHTML so powerful.
Learn more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XHTML
XHTML stands for Extensible Hypertext Markup Language and is an authoring language used to make documents for the World Wide Web. Basically XHTML defines the content, layout and structure of Web documents by using "markup" symbols such as tags and attributes that Web browsers interpret.
It is what is known as a "formatting" language. The XHTML source code itself is text-based (like you would get from a typewriter) although what it then shows in the Web browser after the Web browser deciphers it is formatted and functional.
When you program (aka, write) in XHTML you end up with what are called HTML documents. These documents contain three basic parts:
A line saying it is XHTML and what version of XHTML it is
A header section that gives information about the XHTML document and its contents
The body which contains the actual content
Hyperlinks
The other cool thing about XHTML is that it permits text to be linked to other files on the Internet (known as "hyperlinks") so when the user clicks on the link they are brought to the other document. The ability to hyperlink is a large part of what makes XHTML so powerful.
XHTML is a standard that ensures your code is clean, error free, and symantically correct. There have been a number of standards created over the years for HTML but the latest standard is XHTML, which applies to both HTML documents and also XML documents. There are only a few differences from HTML 4.0, and it is strictly in the syntax (most elements, attributes and values have not changed). Here is the difference in XHTML 1.0 from the old HTML 4.0:
Read about the differences between XHTML and HTML here: http://www.w3schools.com/xhtml/xhtml_html.asp