Web Site Design & HTML

At Rapid Website Design we believe in using well formed XHTML.

What is XHTML

The World Wide Web started with a collection of HTML documents. Hyper Text Markup Language was created to quickly and easily display text in a Web Browser. Since then the Web has grown far quicker than anyone could have ever imagined.

HTML is not perfect though. The main problem with HTML is that text information is mixed with presentational information. What this means is that different browsers display the same HTML pages differently and newer devices for displaying text that were developed after HTML was first created can have a hard time displaying the same HTML page.

To fix this problem, XHTML was created. XHTML separates the text information from the presentational information. This allows different text mediums to have tailor made presentational information while retaining the same text information.

XHTML 1.1

With the introduction of the XHTML family of modules and document types, the W3C has helped move the Internet content-development community from the days of malformed, non-standard markup into the well formed, valid world of XML. In XHTML 1.0, this move was moderated by a goal of providing for easy migration of existing, HTML 4 (or earlier) based content to XHTML and XML. With the advent of the XHTML modules defined in Modularization of XHTML, the W3C has removed support for deprecated elements and attributes from the XHTML family. These elements and attributes were largely presentation oriented functionality that is better handled via style sheets or client-specific default behavior.

Going forward, XHTML family document types will be based upon this new, more structural functional collection. In this specification, the W3C's HTML Working Group has defined an initial document type based solely upon modules. This document type is designed to be portable to a broad collection of client devices, and applicable to the majority of Internet content. Content developers who base their content upon the functionality expressed in this specification can be confident that it will be consistently portable across XHTML family conforming user agents.

Further Information

To find out more, please visit the W3C web site.