XHTML 1.0: Where XML and HTML meet (8/8) - exploring XML

XHTML 1.0: Where XML and HTML meet

Document Profiles

With the modularization of XHTML we have solved one problem: The increasingly proliferating types of Web clients can pick and choose specific subsets of the HTML standard to meaningfully support them given their form factors and display capabilities. But we created two new problems:

How does a client advertise its rendering capabilities to a server?
How does a document express the modules used for its content?

The latter will be adressed through not yet specified document profiles, but will the former remain the art of mapping user-agent-strings to capabilities? Who knows... you?

Conclusion

The reformulation of HTML in XML is an elegant way to bring both worlds together in a future-oriented but compatible way. While it is unlikely that every hand-written HTML page will be upgraded to XHTML, writing new pages in XHTML and improving the templates of page generators like ASP and JSP will give your documents a much wider audience in the brave new world of non-PC Web clients. Make sure you do the best you can to make it happen:

If you are a Web master, start planning the migration of your site to XHTML now!
If you are an HTML tool author, upgrade your tool to support document creation in XHTML now!
If you write HTML documents, adhere to the XHTML rules and DTDs now! Use the W3C validator to be sure you got it right. (Ja, this document has been validated. The remaining errors in line 30, 84, and 92 are caused by server-side includes not under my direct control.)

Thank you, in the name of all current and future owners of Web-enabled PDAs, phones, TVs, and toasters!

URL: https://www.webreference.com/xml/column6/8.html
Created: Feb. 07, 2000
Revised: Feb. 07, 2000

XHTML 1.0: Where XML and HTML meet (8/8) - exploring XML