The new version of XHTML being developed alongside HTML 5 is XHTML 5. Since Internet Explorer 5 is the last browser to not understand XHTML and it doesn’t understand HTML 5 either, XHTML 5 will be the first version of XHTML to become usable at the same time as the equivalent HTML version does. This [...]

While HTML and XHTML may look a lot alike they are really quite a lot different in the way that they really work You can’t get away with all the silly errors in your XHTML because the browser will stop displaying the page as soon as it finds any validation errors at all. The way [...]

The W3C is the closest thing that HTML and CSS have to a standards body. It recognises that it is unofficial by issuing “recommendations” rather than standards. There is a point though where I believe that one of their recommendations does become a standard and that is when all of the commonly used browsers support [...]

Some of the pages that I find the easiest to write are those that have resulted from my getting involved in an “argument” on a forum regarding some particular issue. In this particular instance the discussion was on the difference between HTML and XHTML. One comment that I made was that Internet Explorer does not [...]

This is an (X)HTML summary listing all of the (X)HTML tags and the attributes that each supports. The list excludes those tags and attributes that have been deprecated or which were never part of the standards in the first place. Those which are mandatory, those which are optional but which ought to always be used [...]

When coding your web pages there are two ways to specify the address of other files that you want the page to reference. You can use absolute addresses that include the domain name or relative addresses that don’t. Obviously external references need to use absolute addresses but internal ones are better done using relative references. [...]

If you are creating a new web site these days, there is no excuse for not using a strict doctype for your page. Those tags which are proprietary or deprecated (to be downgraded to “obsolete” by the HTML 5 proposal because too many people still use them to delete them despite fifteen years notice that [...]

A special case when it comes to form fields is the file field. There are many restrictions relating to the use of the form field that allows files to be uploaded, mostly related to security on the computer running the browser. The form also needs to be defined slightly differently once you start including files [...]

These two attributes that you can attach to form fields have very different uses from one another and that difference isn’t to do with appearance. Don’t let the difference in the default appearance of the fields result in your using the wrong one in your form. Disabled and Readonly

There may be occasions where the logical order for ewntering values into form fields doesn’t start at the top and progress left to right and then down the page. This attribute covers those situations by allowing you to change the order that the tab key will take people through the fields. Tabindex

The default behaviour for checkbox fields in forms is that if the field is checked then its value gets passed with the form but if it isn’t checked then the field isn’t passed at all. Here’s how we can code our form so that a value always gets passed whether the field is checked or [...]

The ninth and last of my tutorials on how to use XHTML to mark up tabular data into tables combines all of the information from the prior eight tutorials and shows you an example table using all of the previously discussed options. A Complete Table