Creating Web Sites Bible, Third Edition

Chapter 15. XHTML

IN THIS CHAPTER

• A quick review of HTML

• Enter XHTML

• Transitioning to XHTML 1.0

• Creating an XHTML document

• Code validation in an XHTML document

• Making your site mobile with WAP/WML

• What is WML?

• Interacting with users

• Transforming XHTML into WML

• WML Web sites

There are hundreds of programming languages in dozens of families. They cannibalize, copy, contradict, and exterminate each other at a remarkable pace. There are procedural languages, functional languages, constraint languages, concurrent languages, object-oriented languages, query languages, logic languages, and on and on.

Though Standardized Generalized Markup Language (SGML) is viewed as the source of today's so-called markup languages, Generalized Markup Language (GML), which was created by IBM in the 1960s, is the origin of all markup languages. From the parent source and mostly through the vehicle of SGML, the children HTML, XHTML, XML, XSL, MathML, CML, and others have been derived, as well as such enhancements as frames, interactive forms, stylesheets, and scripts.

SGML is device-independent and is not tied to particular processor architecture. It is portable. It is extensible. It is scalable, and it can have design implementations for minimal essential features (as would be true of handheld devices). It can handle a wide variety of job implementations, even on a very large scale.

Microsoft is a big proponent of XHTML, although whether XHTML will take off and become something of an extension to HTML remains to be seen. ...