i am a regular visitor to http://www.oswd.org, and an enthusiast in learning in css.

but i do nto know the meaning of XHTML, XHTML Transitional and how to test a site for its design consistency and functionability in browsers...

i request help in the above topics, thank you.

XHTML = eXtensible Hyper-Text Mark-up Language.



I suggest you look at http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/#xhtml

Transitional is a DTD of XHTML. XHTML has three doctypes. Strict, Transitional and Frameset.







Glad to see you are into CSS.

Check out css zen garden, mezzoblue, and a list apart for excellent CSS guidance.

XHTML is a stricter and cleaner version of HTML.It stands for EXtensible HyperText Markup Language.
XHTML is aimed to replace HTML. It is not totally different from HTML 4.01.
Here you have to write your HTML code in lowercase letters and you are not allowed to skip end tags.
You can check here to learn more about XHTML.
So far as Markup Validation is concerned, you may use W3C Markup Validation Service. It is free.
Regards,
Sid

From what I know as a fact learning from tuturials XHTML is a combination of HTML and XML (EXtensible Markup Language). XHTML consists of all the elements in HTML 4.01 combined with the syntax of XML. XML was designed to describe data and HTML was designed to display data. So they eventually combined the two to make XHTML to what it is today. The most important things when using XHTML as a language of choice is the elements must be properly nested, documents be well-formed, all tags must be in lower case or else it is not in XHTML format, and ALL of the tags used must have a close tag. For example:

HTML TAG for Break: <br>
XHTML TAG for Break: <br />

I hope what I described to you shed a little more light on your curiosity of XHTML...

Thank you so much people for helping out, i did learn a lot from the information. thanks once again:)

XHTML is HTML redefined according to the stricter rules of XML. The original HTMl was designed using SGML (a government standard for designing languages) which had fairly lax and hard to check rules. XML is a strict subset of SGML.

Practically speaking, XHTML is easier for your browser or any other tool to verify that your page is well-formed and syntactically correct. It is also easier to use tools on, to change something into XHTML, or transform XHTML into something else. For instance, I have other DTDs (XML document types) that transform technical articles (DocBook) into XHTML or PDF and fiction stories (my home grown Book DTD) into XHTML or PDF. This allows you to write your web pages in a language specific to what you are working on and turn it into XHTML before displaying it.

You can test your own XHTML in a number of tools. Many editors, such as JEdit have validation tools either built-in or as a plugin. There is also a W3C web page that will test pages for you. I believe Firefox has an extension to validate pages as well.