Introduction to XHTML

Extensible hypertext markup language, XHTML, is the basic language of the web page. Writing XHTML is not programming. XHTML is not a procedural language. Writing XHTML is more like word processing than programming. Like word processing, there are two approaches to write an XHTML page. There are WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors for XHTML, which will allow your to compose a page, and see the result as you are doing it. The alternative is to use any text editor, such as notepad, wordpad, or even edit.

XHTML uses tags, which are keywords enclosed in “angle brackets” (“<" and ">“) to define the meaning of the text and the format of a page. Working with the XHTML directly gives you more flexible control over the page and how it will appear.

There are two categories of elements; container elements and empty elements. Container elements have a pair of tags, and the text in between is contained within thos tags. The first, or opening, tag is the keyword enclosed in “angle brackets.” The second, or closing, tag is the same as the opening tag, except that the keyword is preceeded by a (forward) slash, “/”.

For example the paragraph tag (keyword p) opens a paragraph with

<p>

and closes it with

</p>

The text in between will be seen on the web page as a paragraph.

XHTML is case sensitive, and the tags and attribute names must all be in lower case.