HTML vs XHTML

Differences you must know!

Nirmal Joshi
3 min readSep 7, 2020
HTML vs XHTML

Markup Languages are those essential tools which are necessary to build a webpage.

As you know each webpage has images, text, forms, buttons or other input elements and various types of structured data that is displayed to the user. Presenting these visual or textual information to the user is the markup of a website. The structure of each webpage is built by HTML, the beautification is done by CSS and the life to the page is given by JavaScript. It is imperative to have a standard markup language throughout all the webpages of that website so that all these information look the same irrespective of the browser or device.

HTML (HyperText Markup Language) was published in 1993 and was the 1st internet-based markup language used for publishing web pages. HTML then quickly evolved and got several versions released, making it a sort of standard for markup languages.

XML which was first published in 1998 is another standard of markup language that is similar to HTML but is somewhat stricter than HTML in error handling and formatting.

Before the release of HTML5, the international community called World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) started developing an extension of HTML based on XML format. The language which was released was named XHTML which stands for eXtensible HyperText Markup Language.

Here’s a list of Most Important XHTML standards:

* Always begin the HTML document with <!DOCTYPE>

* The xmlns attribute in is mandatory

* All the tags (even empty tags e.g. <br/>) must always be closed

* Tag names & attributes must always be in lowercase

* Tags must always be properly nested

* Attribute values must always be in double quotes

* You cannot use short names for attributes

* <html>, <head>, <title>, and <body> tags must

define the HTML page structure as shown below:

<html>

<head>

<title>

….

</title>

</head>

<body>

</body>

</html>

The difference between HTML & XHTML is described more practically in one of my YouTube videos. Check it out here:

Also, don’t forget to check out my Udemy courses and connect with me if you have any questions/concerns/doubts and I’ll be happy to help you become better at programming.

About me:

Founder and CEO of an IT company in India, I have more than 22+ years’ experience of dealing with people,processes and codes. I started online training for my students when it was not in fashion and have trained more than 1000 students/working professionals personally which has helped them to secure awesome jobs or even start their own business.

I am also an active corporate trainer for several years now and have been consulting with top Fortune 1000 companies to streamline their development projects efficiently.

My goal is to share knowledge with primary focus on advanced tools & techniques, projects and standard programming practices to help my students understand the basics and fundamentals and make awesome technological implementations.

If you’re an avid technology aspirant or someone who is interested in creating amazing things in pixels and code, enroll for my courses or connect with me through my Youtube Channel.

--

--

Nirmal Joshi

A founder and CEO of an IT company in India, I have more than 22+ years’ experience of dealing with people, processes and codes.