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XHTML Best Practices Guide

XHTML Best Practices Guide

XHTML1,643 viewsBy Admin
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XHTML Best Practices

Whether maintaining legacy XHTML or applying its discipline to HTML5, these practices keep your markup clean and valid.

Core Practices

  • Always close tags, including self-closing ones (<br />).
  • Use lowercase for all tags and attributes.
  • Quote every attribute value.
  • Nest elements correctly.
  • Provide alt on every image.

Encode Special Characters

&amp;  for &
&lt;   for <
&gt;   for >

Validate Often

Use the W3C Markup Validator to catch errors early. Valid markup renders consistently across browsers.

Separate Concerns

Keep structure in XHTML, styling in CSS, and behaviour in JavaScript — never mix inline styles or scripts.

FAQs

Do these apply to HTML5?

Most are good HTML5 habits too, even though HTML5 is more lenient. More in our XHTML guides.

Why validate?

Invalid markup causes inconsistent rendering and accessibility problems.

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