ByteNoise

XHTML Basic

"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."

XHTML Basic is a simple implementation of XML-compliant HTML designed to work on consumer electronics, such as mobile phones and televisions. Because it is streamlined, you can create a site with a simple interface that is guaranteed to work on pretty much any web compatible device, even if you are generating the pages in a complicated manner behind the scenes. This makes it a pretty good choice of markup language if you only need to use what it supports.

What it supports

The following are supported:

External style sheets
div and span elements
Forms
Tables
Objects

The following are not supported:

The style element
Forms that use file or image input types
Nested tables
Bi-directional text
Scripts
Frames

Example template

The following template may prove useful as either a rough guide or something to copy and paste directly into a new file. With appropriate styling, it can be quite versatile due to the div and span elements.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="us-ascii"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML Basic 1.0//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-basic/xhtml-basic10.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en">
  <head>
    <title></title>
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=us-ascii" />
    <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen" href="screen.css" />
  </head>
  <body>
    <div id="wrap">
      <div id="head">
        <h1><span></span></h1>
      </div>
      <div id="menu">
        <ul>
          <li><a href="#"><span></span></a></li>
          <li><a href="#"><span></span></a></li>
          <li><a href="#"><span></span></a></li>
        </ul>
      </div>
      <div id="main">
      </div>
      <div id="foot">
        <p></p>
      </div>
    </div>
  </body>
</html>

Supported elements and their attributes

General attributes

Note that in addition to the specific attributes, all elements can have class, id, lang and title attributes, with the following exceptions:

base (none)
br (class, id and title only)
head (lang only)
html (lang only)
meta (lang only)
param (id only)
title (lang only)

Specific attributes

a (accesskey, charset, href, hreflang, rel, rev, tabindex, title, type)
abbr (title)
acronym (title)
address
base (href)
blockquote (cite)
body
br
caption
cite
code
dd
dfn
div
dl
dt
em
form (accept, accept-charset, action, enctype, method)
h1
h2
h3
h4
h5
h6
head (profile)
html (xmlns, xml:lang)
img (alt, longdesc, src)
input (attributes differ based on the input type)
kbd
label (accesskey, for)
li
link (charset, href, hreflang, media, rel, rev, type)
meta (content, http-equiv, name, scheme)
object (archive, classid, codebase, codetype, data, declare, standby, type)
ol (start)
option (label, selected, value)
p
param (name, type, value, valuetype)
pre
q (cite)
samp
select (disabled, multiple, name, size)
span
strong
table (summary)
td (abbr, axis, colspan, headers, rowspan, scope)
textarea (cols, disabled, name, readonly, rows, tabindex)
th (abbr, axis, colspan, headers, rowspan, scope)
title
tr
ul
var

(Please e-mail me with any corrections. Thank you.)