Introduction
If, you have no prior experience of Web Design or very little, then this article is for and read on. If, you have tried exporting HTML from Microsoft Word, or played around with FrontPage a little, then this article will help you understand what you have been doing. Understand what XHTML is and how you can start producing the next generation of Web pages.
Don’t use programmes to write code, get your hands dirty and write it yourself as programmes that produce HTML for you, often produce Web pages that go the long way round doing things. Coding pages by hand gives you an an intimate understanding of what you are doing. And, you can actually make the Web page file as small as you like. This reduces download times making your pages quicker to upload and your users far happier.
Using programmes to generate HTML, gives you no understanding of how your page is built internally, since its all doen for you. You can hardly call this a problems is everything works, but what if it doesn’t? If, you find your Web page doesn’t display properly in Internet Explorer 4, and many of your users use that browser, you will need to sort it out. Which means ditching the programme and looking at the code yourself. Problems will occur and it is far better to understand how to fix them than get stuck without a clue.
The Internet is no longer limited to people with computers viewing web sites through one or two different Web browsers. These days, everything has a Web browser from mobile phones, televisions, personal digital assistants, cars, even fridges. Blind users ‘view’ web sites using speech synthesis or Braille devices. There is no way you can test each page you produce in all of the possible ways it may be used. But, there is a way to give you the best chance that they will work. This is achieved through producing pages using the standards laid out by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the people who work on XHTML and other Internet standards. Once you have produced your pages the W3C provide a validation service to check that your page meets the standards and therefore has the best chance of being used on any device. There are no HTML generation programmes that produce valid code.
Why XHTML?
Since 1990, HTML or Hyper Text Markup Language has been successfully used as the language recommended for writing Web pages. However, HTML has its fair share of problems. Without going into specifics, HTML has become a mess. To sort this mess out the World Wide Web Consortium, the standards body for the Web, came up with XHTML in 1999. XHTML stands for eXtensible Hyper Text Markup Language and is written in a language called XML or eXtensible Markup Language.
As the name implies XHTML has the capability of being extended. You can use extra modules to do things with your pages that weren’t possible with HTML. The long-term goal is that your Web pages will be able to be understood by computers as well as humans.
You may be thinking that computers already understand Web pages because you use a computer to view them. This is true. But, computers only understand how to display your pages, not what they mean. Imagine if computers understood what they meant, you could tell your computer to go and visit all of your local supermarket’s Web sites and tell you which one is the cheapest for this weeks shopping. Your computer could visit the news sites around the world and bring back the latest headlines that relate to things you are interested in. The possibilities are endless.
Now, you see why XHTML is important. Since, there is no beginner’s XHTML tutorial, we’ll do it from scratch as it seems logical that if you are starting learning Web Design now, then you might as well use XHTML from the word go. So if you’re still with me, we’ll go from here to XHTML – Part II.
