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Software Interest Group
The UA Math Department Software Interest Group (SWIG)
is a self-organized informal group, consisting of faculty members,
visitors, staff, and graduate students, whose goal is to promote and
advance computer and software literacy among the members of the department
through meetings, talks, and discussions.
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For more details, and talks in past semesters, consult the full schedule of talks.
Past topics can (and should) be repeated occasionally. In addition, here are some topics people might like to hear about:
To give a talk, please contact swig@math.arizona.edu.
What is HTML? What is XHTML? The best place to find answers to these and other similar questions is to visit the official website of the organization that sets up the standards for all these (and other) markup languages. This organization is the World Wide Web Consortium.
A short practical overview of differences between HTML and XHTML can be found in the article Clean up your act with XHTML by D. J. McLaughlin.
But in case you don't want to read all the above suggested sources here is a quick lowdown: HTML (HyperText Mark-up Language) is the language of the WWW (World Wide Web). It is used to describe documents for transmission over the network [here are some examples]. XHTML is the extended brother (or sister) of the popular HTML markup language. But unlike its older sibling XHTML has a strict grammar that is based on the XML specifications and is enforced by the browser. This strict grammar allows other programs/software to parse the XHTML document, extract information from it and remold it into new types of documents. It also tries to encourage separation of style and content through so called "stylesheets". All this allows XHTML pages to be easily portable to other systems/devices, to be readable by machines (e.g. search engines), and to have a uniform style/flavor that is easily modifiable and maintainable.
There are several programs that are able to turn old HTML pages into clean (i.e. XML compliant) HTML or XHTML pages. One of them is Tidy. To download this open source (i.e. "free") program visit the Tidy website. There you can find detailed instructions on how to use the program and a complete description of all of its features.
So please, do clean up your web pages and become part of the new age of the World Wide Web.
To validate your new XHTML pages go to http://validator.w3.org/.
References: HTML & XHTML, The definitive Guide, by Chuck Musciano and Bill Kennedy, O'Reilly and Associates, Inc.
Written: October, 2004.
