By Jennifer Kyrnin
XHTML is a markup language intended to create rich, portable web-based applications.
While it is a descendant of HTML 4.0, XHTML 1.0, and XHTML 1.1, it is not meant to be
backwards compatible with any of them. However, if you are familiar with any of those
markup languages, you will be able to work with XHTML 2.0.
Linking Everything
One of the more interesting aspects of XHTML 2.0 is the idea that nearly anything can be a
link. The concept of this is that rather than having the following code:
<a href="http://webdesign.about.com/"><h2>Web Design @
About</h2></a>
You can make the heading (<h2>) element into a link all by itself:
<h2 href="http://webdesign.about.com/">Web Design @
About</h2>
No More <br />
XHTML 2.0 introduces the <line></line> element. It is meant to replace the <br
/> element, but takes it further. You surround the text that should start on a new line and
have a line break at the end. You can then define if it should wrap or not using style sheets.
Navigation Lists
When looking at Web pages, the XHTML committee noticed that a common use for lists
was for navigation, so they created a whole new list element for XHTML: the
navigation list or <nl> element.
The navigation list encompasses name elements and list elements. And you can even
nest navigation lists to create more detailed navigation. For example, the Web Design
site might have the following navigation:
<nl>
<name>About Web Design</name>
<li href="http://webdesign.about.com/">Home</li>
<li href="/library/weekly/mpreviss.htm">Articles</li>
<li>
<nl>
<name>Subjects</name>
<li href="/cs/whatishtml/">What is HTML?</li>
<li href="/cs/htmltags/">HTML Tags</li>
<li>...</li>
</nl>
</li>
</nl>
Sections and Headings
The new
<section></section> element along with the
<h></h>
element allows the Web developer to structure Web documents into sections. Using
nested sections and headings, you can structure your documents and use style sheets
to define the different section styles.
Using these elements, the first few paragraphs of this document might be marked up
like this:
<section>
<h>XHTML 2.0 - What is It?</h>
<p>
XHTML is a markup language intended to create rich, portable web-based applications.
While it is a descendant of HTML 4.0, XHTML 1.0, and XHTML 1.1, it is not meant to be
backwards compatible with any of them. However, if you are familiar with any of those
markup languages, you will be able to work with XHTML 2.0.
</p>
<section>
<h>Linking Everything</h>
<p>
One of the more interesting aspects of XHTML 2.0 is the idea that nearly anything can be a
link. The concept of this is that rather than having the following code
...
</p>
</section>
...
</section>
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