13.1 Deciding which type of output to produce
If you can choose between HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0, consider XHTML. If you might eventually move to XML, the XHTML 1.0 Recommendation is a good way to make a transition into that area:
According to the W3C, XHTML 1.0 “defines an XML serialization for HTML 4”. Also, HTML 5 uses XML syntax; see:
http://dev.w3.org/html5/html4-differences/Overview.html
For HTML 5 output, you will be concerned mainly with providing an appropriate value for DOCTYPE; see §13.4.1 Specifying HTML/XML version, DOCTYPE, and DTD.
Unless otherwise indicated, settings for HTML apply also to XHTML, to XML, and to HTML-based Help systems.
If your output is destined for electronic books, XHTML provides input to third-party ePub production tools. The ePub format is basically XHTML with some icing. To produce ePub, you can use Mif2Go XHTML output as input to Calibre, which is free:
To produce a single XHTML output file from a FrameMaker book for input to ePub, see §2.5.6 Producing a single output file from a FrameMaker book. To provide a TOC for ePub, you can convert your FrameMaker TOC to XHTML; see §5.5.1 Converting FrameMaker TOC and IX files.
If your output will be displayed on the Web, consider the differences among browsers. If you use CSS (see §22 Setting up CSS for HTML), some browsers, such as Mozilla, do not display XHTML output properly on the Web; they ignore your CSS files. However, these browsers properly display the same XHTML output viewed locally, and properly display standard HTML output both locally and on the Web.
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