Like any technology, HTML has evolved over time. Although standard HTML has served its purpose well, it’s always been a somewhat sloppy language. Among other things, it allows uppercase, lowercase, and mixed-case letters in tags (<body> and <BODY> are both correct, for example) and permits unclosed tags (so that you can use an opening <p> tag without a closing </p> tag to create a paragraph). While this flexibility may make page-writing easier, it also makes life more difficult for web browsers, smartphones, and other technologies that must interact with data on the Web. Additionally, HTML doesn’t work with one of the hottest Internet languages, XML, or Extensible Markup Language.
To keep pace with the times, an improved version of HTML, called XHTML, was introduced back in 2000, and you’ll find it used frequently on many sites (in fact, XHTML is just an “XML-ified” version of HTML). Dreamweaver CS6 can create and work with XHTML files as well as plain old HTML pages.
XHTML was seen as the future back in 2000, but HTML5 has since supplanted it. While web browsers still understand XHTML (and probably will for a long time), you won’t be using it in this book.
Get Dreamweaver CS6: The Missing Manual now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
