What do you guys think? This question is just randomly pop up to my mind in a second right after I answered question about XHTML tag well, there's the transition of HTML to XHTML, and I do think that HTML will later be replaced by XHTML. But, would it possible to be totally replaced? Would browser companies later not going to support standard HTML although XHTML is already replacing HTML?

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XHTML will replace i think, they have been thinking of doing that for a while i think but i also think they will have no reason to take out the support of HTML from browsers, i think IE and Firefox etc will always support it for the for seeable future but new browsers will not that come about, also i think most people will see that they need to update to XHTML

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So what does XHTML offer that HTML doesn't? To me it seems like a transition that doesn't need to happen. Not to say it won't, but right now I usually code in HTML because that's what I learned in.

I think the biggest hurdle XHTML has is that it is a stricter markup than HTML; although that's not really a bad thing, it just makes it harder to learn. For example, <a href=""> and <A HREF=""> both work in HTML but only <a href=""> works in XHTML. Works isn't the right word. Only the lower cased variant is valid. <img src=""> isn't valid in XHTML whereas <img src="" alt="" /> is. Yes, it's probably a good thing to require an alt tag but there are times that a blank alt is the correct thing and I don't think we should be required to specify a blank tag.

edit... And think how many people use <a href="" target="_blank"> to create a popup link. That's not valid for XHTML. The workaround is Javascript, but that doesn't always work with popup blockers.

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- Ryan

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for that in particular is probably because they try to avoid accessibility issues. I never know that by using target="_blank" is not XHTML though

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XHTML is NOT the "latest" version of HTML, it is NOT a replacement for HTML, it will NEVER replace HTML.
HTML 5 will be the replacement for HTML 4.01 when it gets beyond a working group draft document

XHTML is a designed to be used with XML, so strictly speaking, unless you are using XML/XSLT on your pages you should be using and validating to a HTML 4.01 Strict doctype.

target="" IS perfectly valid in XHTML as well, but only in the doctype where it actually has any meaning, and that is a frameset DTD.
In actual fact, a frameset DTD has always been the only one where target="" is valid, because without a frameset the target attribute has no meaning.
The mere fact that it worked does not make it correct to use

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Chris
Indifference will be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?
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aish... then my understanding of XHTML so far is wrong then thanx chrishirst for the information. do you have more supporting information from W3C though? rep added

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You make an excellent point. But there are tons of sites out there that use the _blank target to open a new window, valid or not.

And I've actually never set up a framed site, aside from a few that use iframes for pseudo AJAX type stuff, so I didn't even know that there was a doctype for XHTML frames.

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- Ryan

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From XHTML 1.0

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Chris
Indifference will be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?
Code Samples | People Counting System

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