Embrace The Future Of The Web With XHTML

The proliferation of the internet has lead to exposing the weaknesses inherent in the HTML specification. More and more developers are cursing its prevalence for being the reason they have to waste inordinate amounts of time in making sense of the mess created by the sloppy HTML coding practices. With an eye towards making the web more organized and easier to search, XHTML looks set to change the status quo.

Extensible Hypertext Markup Language or XHTML is a markup language used to format the content on web pages. It builds on the strengths of HTML by conforming to XML syntax. XML is important because it eases the automated processing of information on web pages by using standard XML tools. While HTML processing tools are available, they tend to be custom solutions and can’t guarantee compatibility with all the HTML-based web pages out there. XML was originally thought to redefine the nature of the World Wide Web (WWW) due to the powerful possibilities of easily processing information in XML pages. Unfortunately, the majority of content developers stuck with HTML despite its inherent limitations and annoyances. XHTML was introduced to bridge the gap between HTML and XML and make it easier to transition to an information rich world powered by XML.

Since the XHTML standard is being developed under the guidance of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), it is also known as W3C XHTML. The problem with HTML is that it is quite lenient when dealing with errors. Parsers (special programs that sift through information) and user agents (browsers) have gotten increasingly complex because they are tasked with the burden of correcting poorly written HTML code in web pages. The XML specification calls for stricter rules in writing code so XHTML compliant browsers would alert content developers with a fatal error. This will reduce the complexity of browsers tremendously because they will no longer have to correct author errors. It will also result in faster rendering of web pages.

The XHTML 1.0 specification is only slightly different from the pre-dominant HTML specification. XHTML mainly encourages developers to write HTML in a way that conforms to the stricter rules of XML. Due to the similarity between XHTML and HTML, it is hoped that developers will find it easy to transition their websites to the XML way of doing things. W3C XHTML is expected to painlessly transition the WWW to the future where searching, indexing and parsing information will herald a new era of boosting productivity by guaranteeing easy access to useful and reliable information from the clutter of WWW. XHTML’s benefit of introducing uniformity to document structures is especially important to large organizations and businesses that have to deal with immense amounts of product information and customer databases.

If you have ever had to read web pages on a handheld device, you might be well aware of the problems associated with consistency in the appearance of the web page. XHTML promises to relegate these problems to the past by ensuring that web pages appear cleanly on every device and don’t turn into a garbled mess of content and interface elements like menus. Thus XHTML promotes better interoperability. Despite the promise of a better WWW, XHTML adoption is being hampered by non-existent compliance to the XHTML specification by a major web browser. While most popular browsers have mature support for XHTML, the most widely used Internet Explorer browser fails to render XHTML content and instead offers to save it to disk. IE7 and the beta version of IE8 are equal partners in this crime. The best thing to do in such a state of affairs is to switch to more standards-compliant browsers. This might be the only way to motivate Microsoft to adhere to web standards in a timely manner and speed up the transition to the future of the WWW.

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