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What are the main differences between XHTML and HTML? Which one is better in your opinion, and why? Do most browsers support both?
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HTML and XHTML FeaturesHTML is the standard markup language for creating web pages, while XHTML is a stricter and more standardized version of HTML. Both HTML and XHTML include a wide range of features, such as support for multimedia, styling, and scripting.
Key Differences Between XHTML vs HTML5XHTML is a combination of HTML and XML, whereas HTML5 is a version of HTML. XHTML has its own parsing requirements, while HTML does not have any specific requirements and uses its own. In XHTML, all tags, if they are opened, then they should be closed.
XHTML was developed to make HTML more extensible and flexible to work with other data formats (such as XML). In addition, browsers ignore errors in HTML pages, and try to display the website even if it has some errors in the markup. So XHTML comes with a much stricter error handling.
XHTML can be thought of as an extension of HTML. HTML is made of elements (with 3 components – pair of element tags, element attributes and content) while XHTML has only one root element. Secondly, XHTML is a lot stricter when it comes to the file's structure and coding.
XHTML is based on XML, and thus requires the source to be well-formed. Since XHTML is more strict than HTML, less pre-processing is needed by the rendering engine.
XHTML should be served as application/xhtml+xml for you to take advantage of the benefits, otherwise XHTML will be treated as ordinary HTML. Serving it as 'application/xhtml+xml' is not common on the web due to Internet Explorer, which cannot handle XHTML.
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This is probably the best article I've read on the differences and relative merits of each:
Which should we use, HTML or XHTML, and why?
There is also a rather technical comparison on the WHATWG wiki.
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