Form
HTML does not require its documents to possess any particular form, a feature useful in the Internet's early days when users first learned how to code in HTML. A Web browser could simply ignore code it didn't understand. While HTML possesses an exact set of commands, a programmer doesn't have to write those commands in a structured way for the resulting Web page to still work. This clutter eventually became problematic, and the need for precise structure arose.
Markup
HTML provides instructions for a wide variety of aspects, including markup, or features of how the Web page will appear to a viewer. For a website coded entirely with HTML, any time a webmaster wants to change the general appearance of his Web site, he must edit the HTML markup code on each individual page to achieve the desired effect, even if the content of his site didn't change at all. Therefore, the inability to separate content from markup has become a difficult problem for HTML.
Replacement
The last version of HTML, 4.01, has transitioned to a newer code called XHTML, short for extensible hypertext markup language. XHTML overcomes the disadvantages of HTML, with its ability to separate markup from content, its strict guidelines on form and structure and its extensibility, meaning developers can add new commands and tags to the existing framework. While XHTML will strive to remain backward compatible with HTML, HTML remains at a disadvantage to this new, more flexible programming code.
No comments:
Post a Comment