Re: XHTML and Latest Standards

> I am new to developing Web pages with HTML, and I'm a bit confused of
> where to look for the most current standards.  It would be helpful if

Depends on what you are trying to achieve and on commercial considerations
as much as standards.

> the W3C home page simply said somewhere prominently, "The latest
> standard for HTML specifications" or something like that.  Can someone

The latest HTML standard is HTML 4.01 and that is what you should use
if you are targetting the internet and not using namespaced documents 
intended for XHTML capable browsers only.  You should use the strict version
as the transitional versions were intended for transition purposes to the
new standards at the end of the last century.

However, if you are using the VML or Microsoft Office namespaces supported
by IE, you are not actually producing W3C conforming documents, and should
therefore follow the Microsoft documentation.  (IE invalidly accepts
certain namespaces in HTML and doesn't handle XML properly.)

In the general case of namespaced documents, you should probably use
XHTML 1.1 and must use a media type other than text/html, typically
application/xhtml+xml.  Such documents will not work on internet explorer.

> just tell me if it is XHTML 1.1, 1.0, XFORMS, XHTML-Print, HTML 4.01, or
> what?

XFORMS is a specialist extension to XHTML, not a complete document language.
I don't know about XHTML-Print, but suspect it may be the same.

Received on Wednesday, 10 January 2007 23:56:19 UTC