XHTML

Technology & Computing abbreviation · Internet & Web

XHTML
Stands forExtensible HyperText Markup Language
CategoriesTechnology & Computing

XHTML stands for Extensible HyperText Markup Language, an Internet & web abbreviation.

A reformulation of HTML as XML that requires well-formed markup, with lowercase tags, quoted attributes and every element closed. It was the W3C's preferred direction for the web in the early 2000s.

Example: The old CMS templates were written in XHTML 1.0 Strict, so every image tag ends with a slash.

Usage notes

XHTML 1.0 became a W3C Recommendation in January 2000. Most sites served it as ordinary HTML, so browsers never applied XML's strict error handling. The W3C stopped work on XHTML 2.0 in 2009 in favor of HTML5, which still offers an XML serialization. Habits such as self-closing tags survive from this era.

More Internet & web abbreviations

  • .com – Commercial (top-level domain)
  • .edu – Education (top-level domain)
  • .gov – Government (top-level domain)
  • .net – Network (top-level domain)
  • .org – Organization (top-level domain)
  • a11y – Accessibility
  • AJAX – Asynchronous JavaScript and XML
  • AMP – Accelerated Mobile Pages
  • ARIA – Accessible Rich Internet Applications
  • ASP – Active Server Pages
  • BBS – Bulletin board system
  • BEM – Block Element Modifier

See all 76 Internet & web abbreviations →