the markup syntax of XML is very similar to HTML, but in XML you make you own tags. XML is often used to describe data. XML can be used like a light weight database. Since you define your own tags in XML, you need to make an XML Schema, usually in the form of a DTD so the document knows what kind of tags can be used.
xhtml documents need to start with a doc type
<!DOCTYPE html
PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
xhtml documents should have a namespace and language declared in the html element.
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
xhtml documents should declare a character set
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" />
and then our standard set of tags required for an xhtml document.
<title></title> </head> <body> </body> </html>
So a good template that you could use to start all your xhtml documents looks like this:
<!DOCTYPE html
PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" />
<title></title>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>
my page (even though it has no content) validates
ASSIGNED READING w3schools xhtml intro
REFERENCE w3schools xhtml reference page
ASSIGNED READING w3school css intro
REFERENCE w3school css reference page
