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An XHTML Tutorial That Does Not Assume HTML?
stevelinton writes "I am looking for a tutorial similar to Dave Ragget's excellent HTML tutorial(s), but for XHTML 1.1.
I am NOT looking for a "HTML to XHTML" conversion tutorial. I want to teach a class XHTML 1.1 from day 1, without assuming that they know any HTML at all.
Does anyone know of such a thing?"
I looked around for something like what you are looking for, and I found this. As I see it, the problem with your request is that XHTML is not a "language" in itself. XHTML is essentially an XML-ized form of HTML. When you are writing XHTML, you are still using HTML tags (aside from the XHTML DTDs and such); the difference is that you are following XHTML rules (i.e. all tags must be lowercase, they must be well-formed, you must close all tags, etc). That is why, I think, it is hard to find an XHTML tutorial that doesn't presuppose that you already know the essentials of HTML. My advice to you is that if you are going to teach XHTML from step 1, presupposing no HTML knowledge, the best way would be to teach HTML but require the students to follow XHTML's rules.
www.poak.net
http://www.w3schools.com/xhtml/default.asp
First of all, something _very_ important is to make sure your students understand the 'tree-like' organisation of information in XML. h1 and p tags are NOT designed to be tags for bigger size and line breaks. People tend to look HTML as a paint program, it's so easy and Internet Explorer allows all this stuff.
Then you can show them HTML tags. I think the road from HTML to XHTML is much more dangerous than beginning with XML because of all the bells and whistles that can distract from the fact that XHTML is a _structure oriented_ markup language.
As some of your students will already know some HTML, don't let them corrupt their classmates with "witty" tricks like spacers made out of GIFs and FONT all over the place.
May I suggest Mozilla as a workbench? it can be configured to be extremely strict regarding XML syntax, and if it does fine in Mozilla, you are SURE it's legal.
No problem at all to start people off on XHTML instead of HTML. For an entry level, beginner's course which teaches correct, valid, accessible XHTML which will then link to a CSS stylesheet look at my Intro to XHTML. This includes how to correctly structure information rather than just format it. Includes MP3 files and video. It's free.
I think you are missing the point.
/designing the pages are quite different.
HTML, XHTML mark-up are very similar and someone with a good grasp of HTML would be able to pick up the differences very quickly.
Yes they both are mark-up languages used to create/display web page But how you go about creating web pages with the two are very different. Presently (most not all) html designers would use Dreamweaver to design a web page using table's for poisonings. font tag's to change size,face & colour. etc.
Whilst those who prefer XHTML mark-up try and put the layout elements in to CSS.
So how you go about creating
So teaching someone how to *design* a webpage using HTML is quite a redundant lesson.
XHTML moves the presentation out into CSS completely, and so can be presented by an XML+CSS rendering engine; what's left in XHTML 2.0 is the semantics.
It's possible to use most of XHTML 2.0 in today's modern browsers, though crafting the style sheets to make it work is a job for serious experts. Here is a sample weblog page converted to XHTML 2.0 and it should display properly in most modern browsers: http://w3future.com/weblog/gems/xhtml2.xml
The big missing pieces are XForms, which abstracts the form data model and operations out of XHTML into its own module, and XML Events, which does the same for events (though it is compatible with recent DOM events). There is aplugin for Internet Explorer that make XForms work seamlessly inside XHTML documents, so I suspect that if you are so inclined, in a month or two you can be targeting to the draft of XHTML 2.0 with support for most of its features, and get cross-browser standards-based support for the same kinds of features you're writing back-end ASP hacks and browser-specific JavaScript and ActiveX controls for today. (No, it won't work in IE 4.0 or Netscape 4.62, but neither will most of the hacks and ActiveX controls.)
Here is an article on XHTML 2.0: http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/08/07/deviant.html
Here is an XMLHack article by Simon St. Laurent: http://www.xmlhack.com/read.php?item=1741 who writes
There are some good references here already, but you need to do more than just teach pure xhtml, you should give some history and context, and reasons why xhtml exists. Cover both the benefits, limitations and user agent support. It's important to put whatever you are teaching in context, not just teach it devoid of real life application and history.
Explain xhtml in terms of the main xhtml DOCTYPES/DTDs; strict, transitional and frameset. Without understanding DOCTYPEs the context of markup can be lost. Focus on strict dtd, but be sure to cover it's dangers and limitations in user agents. Getting students to work with strict will give them a better understanding of the whole process of trying to separate content from presentation, develop real knowledge and skills and understanding the benefits of this in the long run. If students use strict they will need to reject all use of deprecated tags, which is a good discipline to get into.
Learning xhtml is not as tough as learning good accompanying CSS practice, especially if you are trying to manage positioning in the design, and also design according to accessibility principles using relative units instead of absolute units.
You should also cover relevant material in W3C documents
Also briefly address xhtml2 (xforms etc), XML and XSL/XSLT.