W3C Recommendation 23 November 2010. HTML 4 is a powerful language for authoring Web content, but its design does not take into consideration issues pertinent to small devices, including the implementation cost (in power, memory, etc.) of the full feature set. Consumer devices with limited resources cannot generally afford to implement the full feature set of HTML 4. The motivation for XHTML Basic is to provide an XHTML document type that can be shared across communities (e.g. desktop, TV, and mobile phones), and that is rich enough to be used for simple content authoring.