The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the organization responsible for producing the standards for web page programming languages and browsers. The W3C was created in 1994 and boasts over 400 international organizations.

The W3C created the HTML 4 specifications in 1999. Then, they decided to no longer update HTML, but, created the XHTML specifications as a way to bridge between HTML and XML. XHTML provides a more consistent structure for browsers than HTML, while providing for more integration of CSS and implementation of XML.

The XHTML 1.0 specifications provide for three variants to aid in the transition from HTML to XML:

• "Strict" combines basic HTML mark-up of content along with CSS for layout. Unfortunately, no browser completely supports this variant.
• "Transitional" allows for some layout attributes to be defined along with HTML tags and attributes
• "Frameset" is used to partition the browser window into 2 or more HTML frames

We take advantage of Dreamweaver's validation functionality to test our code to the "XHTML Strict" specifications. But, the reality of the shortcomings of various browsers sometimes leads us back to the older HTML tags and attributes, mainly for overall page layout.