Sunday, September 28, 2008

Moving on to CSS!

Because lot's of stuff came up between this and the previous blog Chapter 7 of Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML took a lot longer for me to finish than I wanted to take, but it's done and I am diving in to Chapter 8.

Chapter 7 dealt with XHTML 1.0 which is very close to HTML 4.01 that was covered in the prevouse chapters. According to the book XHTML is supposed to next thing, but given that the book is now several years old and that HTML 5.0 is coming out, I wonder if this is still true.

Does anyone out there have an opinion regarding HTML vs. XHTML that they would like to share? If so, post a comment because I would like to others think.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

In the past, the HTML and XHTML spec's were developed separately. The HTML4 spec was developed, then in a separate spec XHTML1 was created. This was mainly done because it was thought that XHTML would replace HTML, but this didn't happen, instead, only a few people are actually using XHTML [1].

At the moment the WHATWG and the W3C are developing HTML5. Which is both HTML and XHTML. The HTML version of the spec is called the same as the parent spec (HTML5), and the XHTML version of the spec which replaces XHTML1.x and XHTML2 is called XHTML5. This is the first time that both HTML and XHTML have been developed in parallel.

So to answer your question, the future of the web is both HTML and XHTML, but it's expected, due to the draconian error handling of XML, that not many people will use XHTML5.

[1] http://www.goer.org/Markup/TheXPhiles/

Dean Edridge

MIBA51 said...

Dean,

Thanks for the great insight regarding HTML and XHTML. One of the problems of trying to learn a new technology or skill from a book that is only a few years old is that there is a good chance that the information is out of date, and that seems to be the case with the Head First book. The authors seemed to have taken the XHTML only road, and it seems that is the wrong path. That doesn't mean I will give up on the book though. I will just have to remember that XHTML is NOT the latest and greatest thing.

I did do a little looking around and picked up that XHTML was a little error intolerant, and your use of the word "draconian" drove home the point for me.

I'll press on with reading the book and my studies, but I'll also expand my horizons a bit and keep track of the WHATWG and W3C sites regarding HTML 5.0

Thanks again,

Jim