Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
IV
Introducing XHTML
One great reason to use WordPress is that it takes care of most problems associated with building
websites, so you can focus on creating great content. Think about what happens when you visit
any website. Chances are good you'll have at least three categories of questions that help inform
your opinion about whether it's good or not:
What's it about? Most of your questions fall under this category, because it's about the content .
As you've probably heard, content is king!
What does it look like? These types of questions are about the presentation of the content.
What can I do with it? How can I act on the content? These questions usually focus on interac-
tivity, usability, and (for our immediate purposes) functionality of the site.
WordPress tends to the presentation side of things through themes, and between external plug-ins
and the core, you can get pretty much all the functionality you might want. Once you've installed
and set up WordPress, you never have to think about these pieces again.
Maybe you want to worry about the look of your blog. WordPress clearly does not stand in your
way. This is where web standards come into play.
Defining Web Standards
WordPress is developed to give support to, and be compliant with, web standards, but as the say-
ing goes, one of the great things about standards is that there are so many to choose from. As we
explained in Chapter 6, “Using HTML in Your Widgets and Blog,” there's been a bit of a debate
going on among the leading thinkers and practitioners of the World Wide Web. Among the battle-
grounds is the question of separating content from presentation. This debate can get a bit tedious,
so we'll spare you most of the details, but it might be useful to run through some definitions and
relevant organizations. Some of these you might be familiar with; others you might encounter while
digging deeper into these issues.
HTML —You know what this is, as described in Chapter 6: the basic language of the World Wide
Web. It consists of tagged text. Tags sometimes represent content, sometimes represent presen-
tation, and sometimes are just abbreviations. This standard is at version 4.01, and has been
since 1997. Although browser support for the standard has been haphazard at best over the
years (adoption levels of HTML far outstripped the ability of standards bodies to agree on much),
this standard has been around long enough that browsers pretty much know what to do with
every HTML tag. In fact, browsers think they know what to do with HTML tags that aren't even
there, but often guess wrong.
XHTML —Extensible HTML (XHTML) “has the same depth of expression as HTML, but also con-
forms to XML syntax,” says Wikipedia. This is HTML that adheres to some of the tagging rules
of XML and handles the rules of CSS better than HTML 4.x. WordPress wants its content to con-
form to this standard, and the visual editor helps you do that.
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