In rough outline, XHTML is HTML with an XML-base. There are various versions of XHTML depending on the intended use. For example, the web pages on this site are validated as XHTML 1.1 (with the only exception for a few pages that contain java applets).

The advantage of an XML-base is that XHTML documents can be validated. Some web browsers won't display a web page properly if syntax errors exist. It's easy to make a typing error when writing the code and detecting a small error by hand is sometimes very difficult - especially if there's a lot of code in it. With the help of validation utilities, an XHTML document can be checked if it's valid or not, and syntax errors can be pointed out.

Another advantage is the fact that it's a W3C standard, that many browsers conform to. Also, the XHTML syntax does not include any vendor specific tags.

I'm not going to try to do any tutorial here, since there are so many great web sites that already have that (check out the links at the web resources). Instead, I have put together a few quick guides that cover the XHTML 1.1 and XHTML Basic 1.0 tags and short examples on how they are used.

This page was last updated: 2003-07-22

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