Should
I Use HTML, DHTML or XHTML
for My Website?
SolveYourProblem.com Article Series: Web Site Design
HTML (Hypertext
Markup Language) is the language
of the web – every website out there is written in some kind
of HTML. Because of the rapid evolution of the web, though,
HTML grew quickly in a very unplanned way. This can lead to
problems if you're not sure what kind or version of HTML you're
using.
Here's a quick history of HTML's different “flavors” so far.
A Long, Long Time Ago...
The first version of HTML was created by the web's inventor,
Tim Berners-Lee, and was loosely based on an existing standard
called SGML (Standardised General Markup Language). This very
first version didn't have an img tag, which meant that no graphics
at all could appear on web pages. Berners-Lee informally extended
the language, but didn't standardise it.
As the web grew, the lack of standardization started to make
it difficult for web browsers to interact – one web browser
might have a new tag that others didn't support, meaning that
people would see pages completely differently depending on
which browser they used. In 1995, HTML was formalized as a
standard named HTML 2, which was the version that the first
mass-market web browsers were based on.
As they extended the standard further, an HTML 3 was introduced
in 1997 to keep up-to-date. HTML 4 was introduced later that
year as an effort to clean up the standard, making it clear
that some tags should no longer be used. Apart from a few minor
fixes in 1999, this is the version of HTML that is still in
use today.
DHTML
Parallel to this development, though, other languages were
being developed that could be included in HTML documents: languages
like Javascript (for interactive pages) and CSS (for styling).
DHTML (Dynamic HTML) was the name given to the combination
of HTML and these technologies. To put it simply, HTML is for
web pages while DHTML is for 'web applications'. As people
start to do more and more things on the web that they used
to do with separate programs, DHTML techniques are becoming
ever-more popular.
XHTML
Sometimes considered 'next-generation HTML', XHTML is a stricter
version of HTML that makes it follow XML standards. XML (eXtensible
Markup Language) is a standard for HTML-like languages that
is being used for more and more purposes, including configuration
and sharing data.
Stripped of the technical talk, XHTML can basically be thought
of as a stricter version of HTML. Where HTML is often messy
and hard to test, XHTML is strictly standardized and can be
run through automatic 'validators' that will point out any
errors you've made. This improves cross-browser compatibility
and makes web pages much easier to maintain, since it mostly
forces information on the style of the page to be separated
from the actual text of the page.
XHTML exists in a few different versions: there is a 'transitional'
version, which lets you keep using some old practices from
HTML4, and there is a 'strict' version, which is the one you
need to use to get most of XHTML's benefits.
The web's standards body, the W3C, runs an HTML validator
at validator.w3c.org.
What Does All This Mean to Me?
You might be wondering at this point why exactly you need
to know about the different kinds of HTML. Well, as ever, the
answer is that you need to choose one before you start developing
your website. You have to be aware of which versions your tools
support to know whether your tools can work together, and you
should aim to pick the kind of HTML that will be most suitable
for your site.
At the moment, XHTML is recommended for most websites, simply
because it makes the whole process much easier, especially
if you use an editor that saves to XHTML automatically. The
only situation in which you should really keep using HTML4/DHTML
is if you're designing a web application instead of a web page.
If your site is, like 99% of the sites on the web, designed
to give information more than it is designed to do anything
else, then you should be using XHTML, preferably the strict
version.
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SolveYourProblem.com : 2007
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