There are several HTML tags which don't need to be closed, like <br>, <hr>, <img>, <link> that don't need to be closed (there is a techie-term for these tags which I just can't recall).

Anyway, to be compatible with the new XHTML 1 standards and the browsers of the future, you have to include a / (slash) within this type of tags. My problem is - where does the / go?

Some people include it straight after the text in the tag like this:

<img src="hello.gif" alt="hello!"/>

And others leave a space between the text and the / (which is what I have been doing):

<img src="hello.gif" alt="hello!" />

My question is - Which method is preferable?

Your second example is correct Harish, so you have been doing the right thing. I tried using a free utility called TidyGUI, which gives an option to convert HTML pages to XHTML automatically. It made a real mess of some of my tables though. I might try and resolve that one of these days. Download it here if you want try it. You'll find that once it's finished doing it's job it leaves a space before the forward slash. It's best to back up your page before trying it out.

XHTML is somewhat of a progression from HTML. The code is less bloated than HTML and web pages in the future are likely to be written using it. A good explanation of what XHTML is about and why the change of from HTML is needed can be found here.

Oh brilliant, I don't think! I have about 1,500 or so pages all in html and most of my tags are in uppercase. Having read that article I can see that I am going to be extremely busy at some stage, I really don't have time for messing about altering all those files.

Hey - all I know is the outdated HTML! Found this out when my boyfriend was helping me with a website... He said "Um, this is really ancient coding here." Geesh, and here I was thinking I was just keeping things simple.

I've got 125 pages in my site and I don't really fancy going through them coverting to XHTML. I might just do it as an interesting exercise sometime (when the dark evenings set in and there's nothing good to watch on the telly).

We're encouraged to convert to XHTML in order to 'future-proof' our web pages. The concept is that tomorrow's browsers will only need to understand one standard code. This would make Browsers more lightweight for use with phones or whatever else might be used to browse the Internet. Pages that contain code straying from the XHTML standard would not display properly.

It's a nice ideal but I can't see it happening in practice. The demand from everyone who uses the Web, and many who write pages for it, is for browsers to be tolerant of 'bad code' in web pages. Most surfers aren't worried what code lies behind a web page so long as the page looks alright in Internet Explorer on their Desktop or Laptop PC.

If Microsoft were to say, "OK, our new browser will work only with correctly written XHTML" then we'd have to sort out our web pages. This seems unlikely though. Also, there is a tendancy for other Browsers to follow suit these days and cater for HTML Standard variations.

I suppose if you want web pages to be compatible with browsing Internet using mobile phones etc then the convertion needs doing. If not, I don't think we need to worry about it too much ...at least not for a good while.

The ideal of creating a standard isn't new. Web pages are supposed to be written to a rigid W3C HTML standard (more info here) but many are not. Some pages look different depending on what browser is used.

To be honest I cannot see that the pages I create and edit being practical for use on a phone, they are pure text with just a logo in one corner and would be impossible to read on a two inch screen.

I suppose I will have to start using lowercase which is irritating as I used to use it when I first started writing pages over seven years ago but changed to uppercase to make it more visible for when I edit. I do tend to use tables quite a lot, There are a couple on every page and some pages have quite a number, some are huge with the coding filling 50 or more sheets of A4 if printed.