XHTML is simply a set of markup codes that structure and style text and graphics appearing on a Web page.
Learning XHTML is learning what these markup codes are and how to use them to style your Web pages.
There certainly are methods available to create Web pages without having to learn XHTML. You already may be familiar with Microsoft FrontPage or Macromedia DreamWeaver.
These are drag-and-drop Web page editors that produce the underlying XHTML codes for you.
You can make Web pages with these software packages in total ignorance of XHTML.
As a knowledgeable developer it is vitally important to know the language, even if you use visual editors to create pages.
As Web applications become more sophisticated, you need to be able to take pages apart and put them back together again at the code level,
not just at the content level.
It is a common occurence that any developer have been exposed to XHTML coding they actually come to prefer working
at the code level rather than using authoring tools. They have more control over their designs and, quite often,
find it easier to work directly with the code than through the editor software.
Hopefully this will be your experience as you learn the XHTML language.
A Web page originates as a standard text file containing the information to be displayed along
with formatting instructions for its presentation on the computer screen. These formatting instructions
are written in a special language called, generally, HyperText Markup Language (HTML) since it is used
to "mark up" the information on the page to describe its arrangement and appearance when rendered
in the Web browser.
Recent efforts to standardize this language have resulted in the eXtensible HyperText Markup Language, or XHTML.
Most of these changes relate to coding practices. Therefore, XHTML is pretty much the same old HTML in new digs.
Here, we follow the new practices but still refer to it interchangeably as HTML or XHTML as situations dictate.