Inert Gas Design
(XHTML Core)
These are the major structural elements of an XHTML document. Because of their dependence on each other and the basic document definition of XHTML they are all required to appear in any valid XHTML document.
Element |
Attributes |
Minimal Content |
body |
Heading or Block or List |
|
head |
I18N, profile |
title |
html |
I18N, version, xmlns |
head, body |
title |
Charater Data |
The body element receives the common list of attributes, and requires the presence of at least one tag from either the Heading, Block, or List groups.
The head element only uses the common I18N attribute, but also has the custom attribute "profile". The profile attribute should be an URI that points to a definition of name/value pairs to be used in meta tags used within the head.
The html element is the main tag in all XHTML documents. Of the standard attributes it only used I18N, and as a matter of fact, this is where the "xml:lang" attribute should be used so it can be inherited by the rest of the document. The "version" attribute has been deprecated since HTML 4.0. It was intended to specify the version of HTML used in the document. The SGML "DOCTYPE" tag serves this purpose now. "xmlns" is a URI that points to the XML namespace which defines keywords used in this document type. The XHTML namespace is located at "http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml", so the attribute should appear: xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml".
The title like the rest of the contents of the head, should not be presented by the browser in the main display. Most browsers do display the text marked by the title tag in the title bar or some other prominate location. Again title only makes use of the I18N attribute.
These are the basic text containers.
Element |
Attributes |
Minimal Content |
abbr |
Charater Data or Inline |
|
acronym |
Charater Data or Inline |
|
address |
Charater Data or Inline |
|
blockquote |
Common, cite |
Charater Data or Heading or Block or List |
br |
Empty |
|
cite |
Charater Data or Inline |
|
code |
Charater Data or Inline |
|
dfn |
Charater Data or Inline |
|
div |
Charater Data or Flow |
|
em |
Charater Data or Inline |
|
h1 |
Charater Data or Inline |
|
h2 |
Charater Data or Inline |
|
h3 |
Charater Data or Inline |
|
h4 |
Charater Data or Inline |
|
h5 |
Charater Data or Inline |
|
h6 |
Charater Data or Inline |
|
kbd |
Charater Data or Inline |
|
p |
Charater Data or Inline |
|
pre |
Common, xml:space="preserve" |
Charater Data or Inline |
q |
Common, cite |
Charater Data or Inline |
samp |
Charater Data or Inline |
|
span |
Charater Data or Inline |
|
strong |
Charater Data or Inline |
|
var |
Charater Data or Inline |
Most of the Text elements use the same attributes and require the same content, only the differences will be noted.
The abbr element only uses the common list of attributes, and requires the presence of either character data, or another Inline element. It is used to identify an abbreviation. The common attribute, title, can be used to denote the unabbrevated version.
The acronym element is used to identify acronyms. The attribute, title, can be used to denote the full phrase from which the acronym is derived.
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