Design Aims

In designing XHTML, a number of design aims were kept in mind to help direct the design. These included:

As generic XML as possible: if a facility exists in XML, try to use that rather than duplicating it.
Less presentation, more structure: already mentioned above.
More usability: try to make the language easy to write, and make the resulting documents easy to use.
More accessibility: some call it 'designing for our future selves'; the design should be as inclusive as possible.
Better internationalization: it is a World Wide Web.
More device independence: new devices coming online, such as telephones, PDAs, tablets, televisions and so on mean that it is imperative to have a design that allows you to author once and render in different ways on different devices, rather than authoring new versions of the document for each type of device.
Less scripting: achieving functionality through scripting is difficult for the author and restricts the type of user agent you can use to view the document. We have tried to identify current typical usage, and include those usages in markup.