Why bother with keeping your code up to date with what the W3C recommends? Don't! Please, put up bleeding-edge Web pages that take advantage of bugs in browsers. Contribute to the working anarchy we fondly call the Internet.
While I do not enjoy stylistic exploits that unknowingly (or even knowingly) create security holes, exploits that contribute to the art world -- even if they only last until everybody updates their browser to the next version -- are wonderful.
Pushing the boundaries of design is part of the Zen experience of the Web. However, most Web development today is not done for spiritual reasons. You should not take advantage of a bug in a browser on a page that is meant only to convey information -- it may haunt you in the future when you have to go back and fix hundreds of pages because they do not work in a new
release of a browser. I've been there!
In order to ensure that your Web pages work the way you want them to in the next generation of browsers, it is imperative that you follow the W3C's recommendations when possible. XHTML standards, when followed carefully, will help you to arrive at this goal.
Because XHTML incorporates many aspects of XML, you should be sure that you're comfortable working with XML. To use XML in real-world situations, you should also know how to read and use some flavor of XML verification software. I recommend xmllint, which was distributed with later versions of libxml, obtainable at xmlsoft.org. The thing that makes using XHTML easier than other languages is that you can apply your current knowledge of HTML to write documents that end up mostly stable, cross-platform and cross-browser compliant.
You only need to tweak your HTML code here and there in order to make it XHTML compliant. Two specific sections of the W3C's XHTML 1.0 specification are useful for converting your HTML documents. Section 4, "Differences with HTML 4" shows changes that must be obeyed to make your documents XHTML 1.0 compliant. Since it is easy to write valid XHTML that will not work in many current browsers, Appendix C, "XHTML Compatibility Guidelines" gives hints on how to make XHTML work in browsers currently available. With future browsers, hopefully, Appendix C will be ignored.
Now that you know what to expect, let's begin by taking a look at the way the XHTML tag syntax works.
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