On the IBM developerWorks site today, there's an article that looks at some things on the other side of the coin from PHP - XHTML and CSS. This new article takes a look at the strict standard and shows you how to work it and mold a site into something light and clean.

With everyone from your eight-year-old neighbor to your eighty-year-old grandmother building Web sites, the Internet has become a slow-moving, bogged-down beast. But with just a few tricks using XHTML, you can build classy, beautiful sites that still load in the blink of an eye.

They talk about what XHTML is, how it gets rendered in the browser, what it looks like (with examples), conversion from HTML to XHTML, and validation. They follow it up with a look at CSS and structuring your page to work best with a CSS-based layout (no more tables here!)