XHTML symbolizes Extensible HyperText Markup Language, as well as its really an development based upon regular HTML, it's intention was also meant to be a way in the direction of eventual XML migration hence the X component.

Because of this XHTML will be displayed as a hybrid of HTML and XML.

Part of the XML class of mark-up languages XHTML documents are well formed due to the mark-up rules and tag rules and for that reason can even be parsed by XML parsers, that is unlike HTML which was at all times part of the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML).

In advance of examining the benefits associated with XHTML, its worth quickly telling you the purpose of SGML, HTML and XML.

SGML is a language for explaining markup languages, specially those used in electronic document exchange, document management, and document publishing. HTML is an demonstration of a language defined in SGML.

HTML is an SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language) program conforming to International Standard ISO 8879. HTML is widely thought to be the normal publishing vocabulary of the World Wide Web, HTML tags have semantic meaning and are predefined.

XML is the shorthand name for EXtensible Markup Language. XML is a markup language much like HTML and was built to describe information. XML tags are not predefined. You have to spell out your own tags in accordance with the needs you have.

In terms of syntax, it's also really comparable to HTML and pretty much all valid HTML elements are also valid in XHTML, nevertheless there are some particular points to note to make certain your HTML document is totally XHTML compliant, these points also apply when generating new XHTML documents.

•    You ought to produce a DOCTYPE declaration at the beginning of the XHTML document.
•    You have to write all XHTML tags and attributes in lower case only.
•    You ought to quote all the attribute values.

•    Attribute minimization is forbidden.
•    The id attribute takes the place of the name attribute.
•    The language attribute of the script tag is deprecated.

So right now let's take a look at the features of XHTML before we look at the actual benefits.

Firstly, XHTML is an acknowledged and official W3C standard because of this all browsers will be compliant, and has now built in support for XHTML, this could be of significant appeal to web developers.

A valid XHTML document, mainly because it utilises XML syntax and markup, will need to have 1 of 3 DTD's, this helps to ensure that all the XML data contained inside the XHTML is valid and also conforms to the correct logic and style as described in the DTD which includes correctly closed and nested xml tags.

Finally, XHTML docs are also backward compatible with non XHTML compliant web browsers as a result of stricter syntax rules.

This affords the following benefits;

Your web pages are more inclined to render correctly across multiple browsers including new and old internet browsers.

Also, it is much better to maintain, edit, convert and format your file as the need arises, later on.

As a result of consistent and nicely organised format of XHTML, your online pages could be parsed and processed easily.

XHTML defines quality standard for the internet sites and if you go along with that, then your internet pages are counted as high quality web pages. The W3C confirms those pages using their quality stamp.

You can learn more to do with XML and XHTML by examining tutorials on the web such as here.