Summary

HTML has served its purpose well by allowing people to build web pages with relative ease, but its lack of structure is limiting when it comes to intelligently processing web content. For this reason, the architects of the Web focused significant efforts on charting the future of the Web with a more structured markup language for creating web pages. This markup language is XHTML, which is a reformulated version of HTML that meets the high structural and organizational standards of XML. XHTML is still in many ways a future technology in terms of becoming a standard used by all web developers, but it is nonetheless important to XML developers and HTML developers alike.

This hour introduced you to XHTML and then explored the relationship between HTML and XHTML. You learned about the origins of both languages and why XHTML has long-term benefits that make it an ideal successor to HTML. The hour shifted gears toward the practical by showing you how to create and validate XHTML documents. You then finished up the hour by learning how to migrate legacy HTML documents to XHTML.