XHTML Basic: Modularization in Action
By Molly E. Holzschlag
HTML is not only officially dead, it's decomposing. That's really, truly the term the W3C uses to describe the concept of XHTML Modularization, which became a Candidate Recommendation as of October 20, 2000.
Maybe you've gotten used to the idea of XHTML 1.0. You may even write your documents using one of its three DTDs. Or maybe you're still using HTML and not paying much attention to W3C recommendations. After all, it's what works that matters, right?
While there's no doubt that one of a site designer's or developer's primary goals is to provide positive user experiences on the Web sites they design, there's also no doubt that the wireless age is upon us. Whether you've developed for wireless yet or not, increasingly industry pundits are saying that access to Web content via wireless and alternative devices will be more common than with PCs in a year or two.
So the primary challenge is how to write documents that work on a range of devices. Doing that is no simple task. It's hard enough to get our designs working successfully on today's myriad of browsers! XHTML modularization is the first step toward giving us the flexibility—and extensibility—we need to author documents for multiple devices.
By the time you read this, the status of XHTML Modularization will be at least in the Proposed Recommendation phase, if not the W3C recommended markup for both Web and alternative devices. By far, the best example of modularization to come out of the W3C is XHTML Basic, which uses modules specifically to create a language geared for wireless design.<>
