Beginning XHTML

What Are Media Types?

One of the most exciting things about writing XHTML is that whatever you write can be viewed anywhere in the world, regardless of the type of computer being used to view the content. This means that whatever content you write, you had better be prepared for it to be viewed on any number of computers, television set-top boxes, game consoles, handheld digital assistants, and mobile phones.

This would be quite a chore had HTML continued its evolutionary path of including presentational elements like <b> for bold and <center> for alignment. Fortunately, as we saw earlier in the book, the World Wide Web Consortium were aware of this and invented Cascading Style Sheets to separate presentation (how the Web page looks) from content (the stuff in the Web page). This means that you can now have different styles of presentations for different devices, without affecting the content of your Web page.

Each of these devices is categorized as belonging to a certain media type. Media types include things like 'screen', for computer monitors, 'print' for printed paper, and 'aural' for speech synthesizers.