Web Authoring - XHTML
One of the most important things to consider about XHTML 1.0 is that it is fully backwards compatible with HTML 4.0 and it allows your documents to work properly in new browsers and old browsers alike. So you can use XHTML 1.0 today on your Web sites without having to abandon support for older browsers. The XHTML language was designed to be easily extended to allow for the future of Web mark-up whatever it might be.
Generally speaking, XHTML is a stricter way to code than previous versions of HTML. By being so, it produces cleaner and more reliable coding, that is needed in order to display Web pages in smaller, portable devices that are so popular nowadays and that display consistently well throughout the different browsers. Basically, XHTML places stricter rules on the way its code is written with the ultimate goal of making Web pages more universally compatible with different browsers and devices.
This stricter and cleaner coding also allows faster downloading of the pages and it works considerably better with search engines. I code all my Web sites to the XHTML 1.0 Transitional standard, but I can design to other standards if required. I also normally aim to validate the pages against the W3C XHTML validator.
If you are reading this because you need a Web site and think you might be interested in finding out more about XHTML, please follow the link below to the XHTML page of the W3C - World Web Consortium - where you can learn more about it and some other Web related issues. In any case, please visit the CSS link to find out more about how can I combine XHTML with CSS to design very effective pages.
