XHTML Standards - Keeping in Line with the World Wide Web

The XHTML standards were first laid out in the year 2000. Many web masters started revising their websites as per the new standards laid out by the World Wide Web consortium or the w3c.org. Established companies such as Microsoft also adhered to these norms and presented their most popular pages like msn.com and Microsoft.com in XHTML standards.

Even after such steps taken by the established companies, still not many websites adhere to these norms or are compliant with XHTML standards. The major reason is that most of the websites have been designed with flavors of HTML that incorporate all types of flashy designs and other techniques. These websites can also rank well with the search engines. Therefore, since most of the search engines have not taken the w3c.org norms into consideration, there has been no pressing need for the webmasters to make the old website compliant with the new norms.

Although there are several benefits of complying with the XHTML standards, nevertheless, there are certain limitations that prevent webmasters to take steps to make necessary changes to their website.

• XHTML standard compliant websites can be easily parsed by a browser. However, the time taken by the browser to parse a clean XHTML compliant code and an error driver html code is negligible. Therefore, there seems no urgent need to clean up the website code.
• XHTML code is cleaner and more compact, layers are used and tables are used only to list data in tabular format. This is the main hurdle as most of the websites in HTML are created in table format even to display simple information. XHTML uses CSS which is used externally to format the information on the page. This makes web page more content oriented rather than stuffed with HTML codes.
• The content areas in XHTML are defined by "div" tags rather than "tables" as in HTML. Trading tables with "div" is a tough job and plus it needs new learning skills. Moreover, "div" tags are not completely equivalent to tables. Thus, it becomes difficult to put information in the proper or original format. This further prevents the lateral shift from simple HTML to standardized XHTML.

XHTML definitely yields cleaner code and compact websites which means smaller page size and faster page loads. Nevertheless, the actual implementation of shifting from HTML to XHTML without changing the look and feel of the original web page is still a very tough job. If you are launching a new website, it is better to develop a website in XHTML from the beginning keeping w3c standards in mind.

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