| XHTML | eXtensible HyperText Markup Language - XHTML is a translation of HTML into the much newer markup language, XML. Eventually generic XML will replace HTML as the language of the Web, but in the meantime XHTML is acting as a transition between the two. The document you are reading is an example of a valid XHTML 1.0 (and therefore an XML) document. Your Browser is able to understand it because it is also a valid HTML 4 document. XHTML 1.0 is a complete translation of HTML 4.01 into XML. For more information on XHTML and other Web Standards, visit www.w3c.org. |
| XML | eXtensible Markup Language - XML is this year's black, and probably last year's and next year's too. It is all things to all people and, despite XML being one of the Web Standards, even Microsoft has started to use it in favour of its own proprietary formats (although true to Microsoft's mentality it is trying to patent its own uses of XML). What it is, is a relatively new standard way of "marking up" or "tagging" documents so that the structure of the content is clear. XML is closely related to HTML in that they are both subsets of a much bigger markup language called "SGML". XML can be used to define the structure of any type of data that can be represented as text, and there is even a graphics format written in XML, SVG. A major difference between XML and HTML is that in HTML the Tags are fixed - there is an official list of all the valid HTML tags, such as <H1> for a main heading, <P> for a paragraph and so on. In XML the author can choose an existing document structure to use, or the author can define a completely new structure, called an "XML Schema", and then create documents based on it. For example RS infotech has created its own XML schemas, which it uses to create the documentation of its clients' networks. Whereas HTML is more about the presentation of content, XML is really about the structure. However, XML is so flexible that it could be used to emulate HTML by creating a schema that defines all the appropriate HTML tags. This is such a good idea that it has already been done by the World Wide Web Consortium and it is called "XHTML". For more information on XML, visit www.w3c.org. |
| XP | Microsoft Windows XP - See Windows XP. |