Extending XHTML

According to the meaning of the acronym, XHTML should be an extensible markup language. The sad truth is that XHTML is by far a language that is not so easy to extend. Basically, XHTML is built on 4 DTDs (3 for XHTML 1.0 and 1 for XHTML 1.1) that allow only a restricted set of elements to be used. Take for example the Blogger declaration of a DTD:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" 
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html expr:dir='data:blog.languageDirection' xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml' xmlns:b='http://www.google.com/2005/gml/b' 
xmlns:data='http://www.google.com/2005/gml/data' 
xmlns:expr='http://www.google.com/2005/gml/expr'>

Despite of the fact that some additional namespaces have been declared, the above DTD declaration doesn't allow additional elements on the page. . Even more oddly, browsers use a non-validating parser. so using the above declaration doesn't make any difference to them. If XHTML was truly extensible, one could write something like this:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC extended "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" 
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-extended.dtd">

By doing so, we can use new elements on the page, for example those that belong to the Blogger namespace. Instead, we still have to use a common set of elements that certainly doesn't lead XHTML to its full potential.

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