When creating web pages, a big question arises. “Should I use HTML or XHTML?”. Sometimes it’s not even as easy as choosing one over the other. You’re confronted with different DTD (Document Type Description) versions and Loose, Transitional or Strict types.
The most important differences:
- XHTML elements must be properly nested
- XHTML elements must always be closed
- XHTML elements must be in lowercase
- XHTML documents must have one root element
- in strict XHTML, all inline elements must be contained in a block element
- XHTML is XSL ready
List of Doctypes lifted from W3C
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd"> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd"> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Frameset//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/frameset.dtd">
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Frameset//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-frameset.dtd">
AutisticCuckoo from the Sitepoint forums claims that XHTML is not good to use for webpages because IE and other browsers doesn’t support it. But why does our XHTML pages work on IE?
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