Re: Latest version of XHTML

On Saturday 08 March 2003 1:34 am, basil crow wrote:
> What is the latest version of XHTML?

There is XHTML 1.1, or XHTML 2.0 if you count drafts.


> http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/ shows XHTML 1.0.
> http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml/ is nothing. Why?
> http://www.w3.org/TR/html/ shows XHTML 1.0. Why? (I thought XHTML and HTML
> were different).
>
> So by all these indications (and since it is the version used at
> www.w3.org) XHTML 1.0 is the latest version of XHTML.

Instead of guesswork based on URLs, look at what the W3C have to say directly:

http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/#recommendations


> So, is XHTML 1.1, despite having the next incremental number and being
> produced by the same working group, *not* the latest version of XHTML? If
> so, then what is it? It is a W3C Recommendation, but are we supposed to use
> it on our new XHTML sites?

You probably wouldn't want to use XHTML 1.1 yet.  It shouldn't be served as 
text/html, and so Internet Explorer and older browsers won't be able to 
understand it unless you are willing to break the rules (and if you do that, 
why bother following the Recommendations at all?).

There's a hack to make XHTML 1.0 backwards-compatible, if you want to serve 
that as text/html.  This is described in Appendix C of the XHTML 1.0 
Recommendation.  Bear in mind that's all it is: a hack.  It doesn't work 
perfectly, so until the majority of your visitors are using agents that 
understand XHTML, you may want to stick with HTML 4.01.

-- 
Jim Dabell

Received on Saturday, 8 March 2003 04:32:01 UTC