XML Companion, The, Third Edition

HTML

XHTML is derived from HTML, and it is useful to know some of the history of this language, in order to appreciate its current and possible future roles.

The concept of electronic links between documents stored on computer systems is an old one, and many hypertext systems have been developed, though most have been confined to linking texts stored on the same system, and have used proprietary technologies. It was only a matter of time before the Internet became an obvious candidate to support a hypertext system that spans systems and countries. With the infrastructure in place, it was only necessary to define two additional protocols: first, a new access protocol that would allow hypertext documents to be requested from a server (HTTP); and, ...