XHTML
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Definition/short description
The Extensible HyperText Markup Language, or XHTML, is a markup language that has the same depth of expression as HTML, but also conforms to XML syntax. XHTML is the successor to HTML and many consider XHTML to be the current or latest version of HTML.
Introductory
The need for a reformulated version of HTML was felt primarily because the World Wide Web content now needs to be delivered to many new devices (like mobile devices) apart from traditional computers, where extra resources cannot be devoted to support additional complexity of HTML syntax.
The changes from HTML to first version 1.0 of XHTML were minor and were mainly to achieve conformance with XML. The most important change was the requirement that the document must be well-formed and that all elements must be explicitly closed as required in XML. In XML, all element and attribute names are case-sensitive, so the XHTML approach has been to define all tag names to be lowercase. The next version 1.1, which is used now, is module-based XHTML using a modularization framework, a standard set of modules, and various conformance definitions. All deprecated features of HTML have been removed.
The work on version 2.0 of XHTML is still ongoing. The current XHTML 2.0 Working Draft is controversial because it breaks backward compatibility with all previous versions, and is therefore, in effect, a new markup language. In this version HTML forms will be replaced by XForms (an XML-based user input specification allowing forms to be displayed appropriately for different rendering devices), HTML frames will be replaced by XFrames, etc. See more in Wikipedia.
