W3C Announces XHTML As Its Recommendation

miester writes "Since I haven't seen anything about this on Slashdot I thought I might submit it. W3C has officially recommended that XHTML Basic be the next step for the World Wide Web. Just when I learned how to do tables ...."

Comments

XHTML Basic = a good things for content creators

[Quietti]

Honnestly, look at W3C's own homepage and see for yourself what clean HTML means. Already since the first XHTML draft was released almost a year ago, they have simplified their presentation, but the important stuff is still there: the documentation about WEB Publishing standards.

Sure, there are colors and neat formatting tricks, but most of that is done using CSS. Oh, there are a few icons and logos, too. Is the absence of frames and nested tables an obstacle to the content's diffusion? Well, admit it, it is not. All we need to find from W3C is there: the standards.

Also, while the obvious intention of XHTML Basic is to reconcile WML and HTML into a unified common base, note that Web Content created using this barebone standard with linked CSS sheets (as opposed to embeded style rules within the text) also has another strong advantage: it obsoletes the very concept of forcing people to "upgrade" to whatever latest version of a specific browser, which increases accessibility of the content and makes it possible to use "deprecated" browsers without loosing anything significant.

My own appreciation of XHTML Basic, from an HTML comparision point of view, is that it is about half-way between HTML 2.0 and 3.2: basic text and images, plus forms and tables, with XML rigor as a bonus. If your Web Authoring really is about content, not Flash animations demo, then XHTML Basic is all you really need.

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Noooo! Not XTHTML Basic!

[small_dick]

The XHTML Pascal working group will be crushed.

XHTML Basic != XHTML

[leighklotz]

Note that XHTML Basic is a stripped-down version of XHTML for phones, etc. It's meant to be the future of WML, not the future of Netscape (uh, IE, Opera, whatever).

As for tables, XHTML Basic includes tables, but simplified ones as necessary for reduced screen real-estate devices, not tables as are used to layout complex graphic designs in HTML.

Give XHTML a try -- as far as web authors go, it's pretty much just using lowercase tags and closing them all. Or try HTML Tidy with the "-clean -asxml" options to convert your HTML pretty effortlessly to XHTML. Current browsers will work fine with it.

Disclaimer: I am a member of the XML Forms committee, a descendent of XHTML, but I had nothing to do with XHTML Basic.

XHTML and LCDs

[Robert S Gormley]

...as in Lowest Common Denominator. To me XHTML is not a step forward in many senses, but a step back. Things like nested tables, and quite a few others (I'm not sure right now, I forgot!) are now "unavailable", as some Internet Devices may not be able to use them.

It's definitely a step towards device independant web browsing, but I think a better approach would be two streams. Some might think this an evil idea, but if this is the way W3C is going, with all its member companies dreaming of their own little 'devices', perhaps a stream for "feature rich" browsers and another for "feature poor" is appropriate...

Re:XHTML and LCDs

[Fred Ferrigno]

There's nothing wrong with saying "hey, your browser might not work with this." The problem is that server-side browser detection says "I know more than you about what your browser can handle." A good site should, as was suggested, offer two versions. The important part is to let the client choose which one to use, rather than forcing one.

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For The Confused (Shoulda Been In The Summary)

[CritterNYC]

XHTML 1.0 is the current W3C recommendation for regular web content (ie the stuff we use HTML for now). XHTML Basic is basically a subset of the XHTML 1.0 functionality and is "designed for Web clients that do not support the full set of XHTML features; for example, Web clients such as mobile phones, PDAs, pagers, and settop boxes".

Basically, XHTML Basic has about the same feature set as HTML 3.2: images, forms, simple tables, etc.

HTML moving forward

[Alomex]

I'm always amazed at how wrong Tim Berners-Lee got SGML and how for exactly that reason HTML was successful where SGML had failed miserably.

XML is an effort from the SGMLers to retake the lead and bring HTML back to the purity of markup languages.

Originally XML was a simplified SGML aiming to replace HTML. So much for that one. Many of the original SGML problems were still there (in a nutshell too powerfull and general for the average web page).

However SGMLers learned in the process, split the original XML proposal into many subcomponents, including XHTML. They also learned that rendering/formating is important and should be part of a tagging standard (thus XSLT)...

We'll see if the world finally follows them in this third attempt to take over text management...

Basic is just a subset

[canowhoopass.com]

XHTML Basic is just a subset of XHTML 1.0 which already achieved recommended status last January.

http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/

It is meant to be used for smaller applications such as PDA's and such. Personally I believe this set will go the way of the dodo. Designers will not be too keen on creating yet another version of their sites just to accomodate another markup.

I do plan on updating my own sites to xhtml transitional within the next couple of months.

-Rod!

Re:Basic is just a subset

[JimDabell]

Personally I believe this set will go the way of the dodo. Designers will not be too keen on creating yet another version of their sites just to accomodate another markup.

You're missing the point. You can create a single set of xml files to store your content, and two (or more) xsl files, to render into different formats, e.g. xhtml, xhtml basic, pdf, etc.

Another reason to avoid tables

[lemox]

It's not just about device independance, it's about a change in concept. Tables were not intended to be formatting elements, but to contained tabulated information. Previously, there was no other way to do the same kind of formatting that tables accomplished, therefore they were used as such.

Now we have Dynamic Positioning, which negates the necessity to use tables for formatting. It can do everything tables can do, and much, much more. Being able to look at positioning attributes in their own seperate file eases upkeep by an infinite amount when compared to wading through multiple levels of tables that will break if just one of the tables is off by a bit.

Dyanmic Positioning is a CSS element, therefore seperating Style from Content(tm). If everyone started using tables only for their intended purpose, the searching capabilities would expand tenfold. TD stands for Table Data, not "A place to to put yet another grossly overused left-hand nav buried within 10 nested tables".