I'm just learning HTML, but some say XHTML is better. The W3C recommends XHTML, and I know W3C is more credible, right?
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1I found this useful in deciding which one to use. http://hixie.ch/advocacy/xhtml – dietbuddha Mar 25 '11 at 05:15
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1HTML rules, the rest markup are just syntactic sugar :) – sakisk Mar 25 '11 at 13:29
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1XHTML is dead, and [HTML is now a rolling standard](http://joshuakehn.com/blog/view/40/W3C-Now-Encourages-HTML5-Adoption) including all previous HTML "5" features. – Josh K Mar 25 '11 at 17:51
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The W3C does not recommend XHTML. Your information is years out of date. – user16764 Apr 13 '13 at 02:17
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what you should learn next is off-topic per **[faq]** – gnat Apr 13 '13 at 04:49
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XHTML was a reformulation of HTML using XML semantics (i.e., allow an "HTML" document to be treated as XML). This had the potential for many things, such as incorporating MathML (a math-oriented markup language) in an web page. Like many trendy things, it became popular, but never really that useful (for example, many servers still served XHTML documents as HTML for Internet Explorer, which didn't understand XHTML, thereby negating the benefits of XHTML). A few years ago, the W3C began work on new versions of both HTML and XHTML. The XHTML working group was eventually scrapped, which tells you something about the future of XHTML (although XHTML5 is still undergoing work I believe).
In short, it's probably best to focus on HTML.
That said, it doesn't really matter; major browsers will understand XHTML (especially if you just serve it as text/html), and XHTML isn't that dramatically different from HTML (unless you're doing "advanced" things, like incorporating MathML markup).
mipadi
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I'm not sure where you got that the "W3C Recommends XHTML" over HTML—while that may have been true at one point, it definitely hasn't been the case since they closed down the XHTML2 Working Group last December.
XHTML 1.1 and 2 are both dead-ends and not worth your attention.
XHTML 1.0 was just a reformulation of HTML4 in XML, in the same way that XHTML5 is just a reformulation of HTML5 in XML.
Whether you choose HTML5 or XHTML5 is pretty much a matter of personal preference at this point—neither is more up to date or advanced than the other.
Dori
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Of course XHTML provides some advance features. But you should start with HTML and XML as they are easy to learn and understand as compared with XHTML. After being comfortable with HTML and XML you can easily go for XHTML.
Mudassir
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HTML is standard, XHTML is old XML based anachronism...
Since you are begginer good start at learning HTML would be to analyse existing Web pages around the web, by either using web dev tools inside browsers or some web-app that let's you analyse layout of a web-page and all HTML tags on it like webdeconstructor.com for instance ....
be persistent and results will come
BlackRaider
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