eXtensible HyperText Markup Language (XHTML)

Since the Internet started to grow, one of the most widely used services has been the Web. The initial concept for the Web was that people could make documents available over the Internet which could be viewed through a Web Browser, the term "Web" comes from the core concept that these documents could be linked together, creating a Web.

In order to create these links without having to write a program or make the Web documents so large that they would take a long time to download, a language was created to "markup" text with formatting and anchors (links to other documents). Because this markup was simple to add to any text and didn't require any special software to create, it was easy for authors to learn this HyperText Markup Language (HTML), and small enough to be able to transfer over an Internet connection in a few seconds.

Since this initial concept there has been an explosion of Internet usage and Web publishing, along with this the markup language has also grown. One of the new concepts in Web publishing is eXtensible Markup Language (XML) which allows users to create their own markup language or standard which they and others can use to publish different types of documents. This markup is designed to give meaning and structure to data.

Because of these emerging technologies, the definition of what HTML is and does needed to be refined to bring it in line with these new Web publishing concepts, with a view to it becoming an XML standard for page layout (but no longer for page style or formatting).

And so as a transition between the old style HTML for laying out data and marking up style and formatting, and the new XML standards for layout and document transformation (XSLT) and style (CSS), the XHTML standard was created, now designed to give data structure, and the style controlled from a Cascading Style Sheet (CSS). XHTML is an acronym for "eXtensible HyperText Markup Language", a reformulation of HTML 4.0 as an XML 1.0 application. XHTML provides the framework for future extensions of HTML and aims to replace HTML in the future. Since its standardisation, it has become the de facto standard for publishing documents on the Web.

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For more information visit: http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/#xhtml1