What are the main differences between XHTML and HTML? [closed]

Answer 1

XHTML is based on XML, and thus requires the source to be well-formed. Since XHTML is more strict than HTML, less pre-processing is needed by the rendering engine.

XHTML should be served as application/xhtml+xml for you to take advantage of the benefits, otherwise XHTML will be treated as ordinary HTML. Serving it as 'application/xhtml+xml' is not common on the web due to Internet Explorer, which cannot handle XHTML.

Answer 2

Summary: use HTML.

There are many differences, and many smart people (that know what they are talking about :D) have already summed up most of the pros and cons.

Answer 3

This is probably the best article I've read on the differences and relative merits of each:

HTML Versus XHTML

Which should we use, HTML or XHTML, and why?

There is also a rather technical comparison on the WHATWG wiki.

Answer 4

The Extensible Hypertext Markup Language, or XHTML, is a markup language that has the same depth of expression as HTML, but also conforms to XML syntax.

XHTML is "the modern version of HTML 4".

More info : wikipedia and W3C

Answer 5

It's not about which one is better; the HTML still continues to develop, and HTML5 is on its way (for years, though :) ) and delivers some new elements for easier management of new technologies like multimedia in web pages.

On the other hand, XHTML is about strictness of XML, should we say keeping things clean. If you keep your HTML document well-formed (close every opened element, keep things nested in the tree-form), you're getting the best out of XHTML/XML world and can still be using the HTML format, declaring your documents to be HTML, but still keeping them 'clean' (well-formed). I don't think we should declare each of them 'better'; they can co-exist. It's just about us doing our things the right way.

Answer 6

As previously stated, XHTML should be (in theory) valid XML. In theory (but not in practice) non-conforming XHTML should not be rendered by the browser.

There is very rarely an advantage to use one over the other, so write whichever you personally prefer - as long as you do it consistently. HTML5 which is going to be the future web-standard will support both XHTML and HTML 4.01-style tags (the prior via optional "XML serialization"), and XHTML2 is looking like it will be pretty much dead in the water with no vendors actively supporting it.