How to Convert a FrontPage Website to XHTML
According to the World Wide Web Consortium, the academic community designed HTML for the exchange of scientific and other technical documents. In a short space of time, however, HTML outgrew its original purpose and became the standard publishing language of the World Wide Web. By default, Microsoft FrontPage uses this standard HTML for its page encoding. In January 2000, however, the W3C recommended that developers migrate their content to XHTML 1.0. One of the key benefits of migrating to XHTML is that documents conforming to this specification will more likely work with the latest browsers.
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Instructions
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Update a Single Page
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Open the page you wish to migrate from HTML to XHTML in FrontPage using "File" and "Open," or double-click the file in the folder list on the left. Click "Code" at the bottom of the document window of the newly opened page.
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Right-click anywhere on the page. Click "Apply XML Formatting Rules." This will override any site-wide page formatting settings and apply ending tags to this page.
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Click CTRL+HOME to get to the top of the document. Enter a valid XHTML doctype, either strict or transitional, on the first line of the page above the opening <html> tag.
- Strict (recommended for new pages): <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
- Transition (recommended for migrating pages): <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
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4
Switch to Design view. Double-click each picture in Design view to define the "alt" description. Click the "General" tab and enter a description for the image in "Text." Click "OK."
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Save your page using CTRL+S, "Save" from the File menu or the Save icon from the toolbar. Test your page in multiple browsers, such as Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome and Safari. Publish the page to the Internet.
Update All Pages in a Website
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Click "Page Options" in the "Tools" menu, then click the "Code Formatting" tab.
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Select the checkboxes for "Tag names are lowercase" and "Attribute names are lowercase." XML is a case-sensitive language, so XHTML documents must use lower case for all element and attribute names. Uncheck the checkbox for "Allow line breaks within tags," as XHTML does not allow for extra white space within tags.
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Click the checkbox for "HTML attribute value quotes" on the IntelliSense tab of Page Options. In XHTML, attribute values must always be quoted. Click "OK."
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Open a webpage by double-clicking it in the folder list. Switch to Code view. Right-click and select "Reformat HTML."
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Switch to Design view. Double-click each picture in Design view to define the "alt" description. Click the "General" tab and enter a description for the image in "Text." Click "OK."
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Save your page using CTRL+S, "Save" from the File menu or the Save icon from the toolbar. Test your page in multiple browsers, such as Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome and Safari. Repeat for each page in your website. Publish the page to the Internet.
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Tips & Warnings
Add the doctype code snippet to FrontPage Page Options so that it can be easily entered using CTRL+ENTER.
Microsoft FrontPage preserves the code formatting of existing pages when you open them. You must update pages using the single page method to migrate these pages from HTML to XHTML.
Use the Transitional XHTML doctype declaration for migrating from HTML to XHTML as Strict XHTML has several additional rules pertaining to attributes that can no longer be used. Much recoding would be required to comply with these rules.
References
Resources
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