Beginners and the dilemma of HTML versus XHTML

A much disputed issue on the internet resources is the question of HTML versus XHTML. There are many participants on different web resources and communities as forums, mailing lists, newsgroups and blogs. And many persons are asked by the beginners what to use best HTML or XHTML. This question may be very important because it can affect the attitude and the working tools of a novice. It is very important to mention that both HTML and XHTML are important tools, but they have to be used for different tasks.

While for a beginner this can be a too unclear answer. It is very important to stress out that XHTML is not a tool that beginners can use. There are some arguments that XHTML is a new step in the evolution of HTML, but this is yet a thing that is not so sure, despite the many advocates it has. If this is correct then it will be necessary to teach XHTML from the ground up. It is an interesting idea, but the actual teaching is mainly done in a text/html environment. And in these conditions attempting to teach XHTML is very complicated and makes the learner to entangle in the vast volume of information. The XHTML offers a lot of material for learning, and this not taking in consideration the issues of browser support. In this situation it gets clear that the learners in most cases simply are not prepared, and it is better to teach them HTML instead

XHTML has included all the XML handling requirements and it is not only a HTML 4 in XML syntax. Also many suppositions concerning the possibility to use XHTML as text/html and after change it to XML with an improved browser support have no significant evidence to demonstrate that XHTML evolutes in a text/html environment will not make the transition to XML.

Many internet resources which offer tag-soup pages contain extremely complicated information for the beginner, and don’t touch upon the basics that the visitor has to know. This is why many beginners that learned XHTML under HTML, will not understand the elementary aspects of XHTML.