Emerging and Established Web Technologies

Highlights of Emerging and Established Web Technologies: 

XHTML

The Extensible HyperText Markup Language (XHTML) represents most current W3C recommendation for hyptertext implementation ⁴. XHTML merges the Extensible Markup Language (XML) technology with the HTML 4 standard to create a very flexible language that sets the framework for future Web page development. XML is a subset of Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), a language used to define markup languages (one such language defined by SGML is HTML). XHML is HTML expressed using XML. The old HTML standards will still work in Web browsers, but Web developers can use the new XHTML standard to write Web pages that can integrate well with other technologies defined by XML.

XSL

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) were first introduced by the World Wide Web Consortium in 1996 ⁵. CSS has been standardized to level 2 ⁶ and CSS Level 3 is in development ⁷. Style sheets make it possible for you to specify the look and layout of your Web documents in one place, rather than using elements such as FONT in your HTML file itself But the just as the "X" idea was added to HTML, so too can the idea of extensibility be applied to style sheets. Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) is a language different from CSS, but sharing the same concept of working with the look and layout of a document. XSL has been developed to address the needs of large and complex publishing efforts and tasks. XSL 1.0 has been completed as a working draft ⁸.
Associated with XLS is a language called XSL Transformations (XSLT). XSLT is a language for transforming XML documents into other XML documents. XSLT has been defined as a recommendation ⁹. Another language, XML Path Language (XPath), can also be used with XSL to access particular parts of an XML document. XPath has also been defined as a recommendation ¹⁰. With XSL and related technologies, Web implementors can have a powerful way to manipulate large and complex documents published on the Web

DOM

The Document Object Model (DOM) is a standard ¹⁴ for representing the structure of a document. Programmers can use the DOM to add, delete, and change parts of a document. This makes it possible to write content to be delivered on the Web that can adapt itself to any browser or platform. The DOM provides a framework for scripts to access the content, structure, or style of a document, or to perform some processing and incorporate the results back into the document.