HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide, 6th Edition

HTML Versus XHTML

It's not Latin, but HTML has reached old age in standard version 4.01. The W3C has no plans to develop another version and has officially said so. Rather, HTML is being subsumed and modularized as an Extensible Markup Language (XML). Its new name is XHTML, Extensible Hyptertext Markup Language.

The emergence of XHTML is just another chapter in the often tumultuous history of HTML and the Web, where confusion for authors is the norm, not the exception. At its nadir, the elders of the W3C responsible for accepted and acceptable uses of the language—standards—lost control of the language in the browser "wars" between Netscape and Microsoft. The abortive HTML+ standard never got off the ground, and HTML 3.0 became so bogged down in debate that the W3C simply shelved the entire draft. HTML 3.0 never happened, despite what some opportunistic marketers claimed in their literature. Instead, by late 1996, the browser manufacturers convinced the W3C to release HTML standard version 3.2, which for all intents and purposes simply standardized most of Netscape's HTML extensions.

Netscape's dominance as the leading browser, and as a leader in web technologies, faded dramatically toward the end of the millennium. By then, Microsoft had effectively bundled Internet Explorer into the Windows operating system, not only as an installed application, but also as a dominant feature of the GUI desktop. In addition, Internet Explorer introduced several features (albeit nonstandard at the ...