Computer Careers Book
Sunday, October 17, 2004
HTML
This updates the article at:
HTML for Not Yet Techies
Technically, HTML is now an out of date technology. It's
been officially replaced by XHTML, which is XML-compliant.
HTML 4 is the last version.
The differences between HTML and XHTML are mostly minor.
All up to date browsers support both. There are so many
web pages up that are still in HTML -- even 1.0 -- that
I'm sure that browsers will continue to support it for
the foreseeable future.
Not to mention that many sites still going up are in
HTML not XHTML. I assume that the latest versions of
HTML editors such as FrontPage etc now produce XHTML,
but I see no reason to upgrade my version of FrontPage.
Not just for that.
There are programs that will convert HTML pages to
XHTML quickly and easily, but it still takes some time
to do so, especially if you have a lot of pages, so
why bother?
Search engines will no doubt continue to crawl HTML
pages as long as HTML pages containing worthwhile
content exist, which will be for many years to come.
So, if you're just starting out learning web design
and development, by all means learn and use XHTML and
learn the small differences in the horizontal rule
(HR), line break (BR) and meta tags and about the
capitalization, so you're not confused when you look
at the source code of a HTML page.
