 XHTML Examples
As you can probably guess by now, XHTML code looks very
similar to plain old HTML code, with just a couple of syntactic
differences. Three examples of valid XHTML documents are shown below. They
were validated using the W3C’s XHTML validation tool, located at
http://validator.w3.org/.
Example 1:
This example used the strict DTD, meaning that every single tag must be
closed properly, all attributes assigned values, etc:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html
PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
<title> Strict DTD XHTML Example </title>
</head>
<body>
<p>
Please Choose a Day:
<br /><br />
<select name="day">
<option selected="selected">Monday</option>
<option>Tuesday</option>
<option>Wednesday</option>
</select>
</p>
</body>
</html>
Example 2:
This example uses the transitional DTD, which provides support for older
browsers that don’t recognize style sheets. You can see it uses several
attributes within the <body> tag, which aren’t allowed when using the
strict DTD:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html
PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
<title> Transitional DTD XHTML Example </title>
</head>
<body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" link="#000000" text="red">
<p>This is a transitional XHTML example</p>
</body>
</html>
Example 3:
This example uses the frameset DTD, which allows us to split one XHTML
page into multiple frames, with each frame containing an XHTML page within
it:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html
PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Frameset//EN"
"DTD/xhtml1-frameset.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
<title> Frameset DTD XHTML Example </title>
</head>
<frameset cols="100,*">
<frame src="toc.html" />
<frame src="intro.html" name="content" />
</frameset>
</html>
Conclusion
XHTML documents look more professional and eradicate
sloppy coding habits. They still allow us to develop pages for older
browsers, however, by using the transitional DTD declaration.
One of the hardest things to do with your site is to
modify its pages to conform to the XHTML strict DTD. If you play around
with the XHTML validator at
http://validator.w3.org/check, then you will see what I’m talking
about.
In my opinion, XHTML is a very good idea. I like the idea
of using an XML parser to navigate through XHTML files. I also like the
idea of mixing HTML with XML… they are the two most popular markup
languages in the world and should compliment each other well. Hopefully,
XHTML will deprecate HTML over the next couple of years.
Although we’re along way from every site on the web
becoming XHTML compliant, it’s good to know that there are standards set
in place that we can follow as professional web developers.
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