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The Web's Future: XHTML 2.0
Lee writes "Over the years, HTML has only become bigger, never smaller, because new versions had to maintain backward compatibility. That's about to change. On 5 August 2002, the first working draft of XHTML 2.0 was released and the big news is that backward compatibility has been dropped; the language can finally move on. So, what do you as a developer get in return? How about robust forms and events, a better way to look at frames and even hierarchical menus that don't require massive amounts of JavaScript. This article takes a sneak peek at what's new in XHTML 2.0 and how you might one day put it to use."
Now just convince the gazillions of bad webdesigners out there to actually use the standard, any standard, please?
Wax-Museum Fire Results In Hundreds Of New Danny DeVito Statues
It would be nice if Taco and Co. would retool /. to follow some decent standards. I mean, dear God man, they're still using font tags.
/. could save alot of money just by switching to existing standards.
Add up your bandwidth costs using table and font tags, and then add them up using pure CSS layout - a site with the traffic of
My question is, are they expecting browsers to simply only understand only XHTML 2, or just that the current browsers out there will not be able to read XHTML 2, but future browsers will have be able to read both XHTML 2 and the previous?
If the browsers are allowed cross-compatibility, then I say I like what I see. But if HTML and et all are thrown out the window completely, then I don't think we will ever see XHTML 2 ever put into practice.
AnamanFan - Trying to find the Truth, one post at a time.
Which of the following looks more like "500 lbs of HTML":
<style type="text/css">
body { font: bold larger "Verdana" }
</style>
<body>
<p>This is my duh page.</p>
<p>It is a nice page.</p>
<p>It has three paragraphs. Wow.</p>
</body>
or:
<body>
<p><font face="Verdana" size="+2"><b>This is my duh page.</b></font></p>
<p><font face="Verdana" size="+2"><b>It is a nice page.</b></font></p>
<p><font face="Verdana" size="+2"><b>It has three paragraphs. Wow.</b></font></p>
</body>
Liberty in your lifetime
and
. It's not a replacement for DHTML menus (boo! hiss!) or anything like that; effects like that would still be handled via (ECMA|Java)script or CSS.
:)
/. comments is <a>, <p>, <blockquote>, <em> and <strong> (and like I said earlier, that last is being challenged). This is, quite frankly, really, REALLY sad. Why hasn't /. gotten rid of all their legacy crap yet?)
For another, backwards compability has not been "dropped" in the sense that it's gone completely, total split with the past, et cetera. It's just no longer a priority. You can likely expect <br> and maybe the <hN> elements to dissapear entirely as things evolve (many are in favor of that last; many aren't) in addition to those that have already gone byebye. There's also debate about the sematic value of <strong> and either <abbr> or <acronym> (I can never remember which one folks want to get rid of) and whether or not they should stay.
There's also quite a bit of talk about how to handle titles for other elements. Some folks question why <name> is being used instead of <h> in the new navigation lists, for example.
And they're right about XLink, by the way. There's a new reccomendation being put together to try to address these issues, called HLink. You can find it at http://www.w3.org/TR/hlink/.
And just so I can put out these totally unsolicited opinion: XFrames absolutely rocks. Love it. Nurture it. And I've been waiting way too long for <img> to die; now let's just all hope that Microsoft fixes up all of their horrifyingly large bugs with <object> in time for this...
(Ah, one more note. Slashcode doesn't appear to allow the <code> element in comments. Indeed, the only semantic markup allowed in
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viqsi - See "vixen"
If we do not change our direction we are likely to end up where we are headed.
...the problem is that many designers don't know enough about programming to muck around with the table tags to get the layout perfect.
I agree that it's a waste of a programmer to have to muck around with stylesheets...but the programmer should have not problem implementing them. And, many times, programmers understand more about which properties are supported in which browsers...lots of designers just throw together their stylesheets in Dreamweaver without giving much thought to what's going to work and what's not.
On an only slightly related note: it is interesting that IBM is pushing this, when IBM is internally still requiring support for Netscape 4.x users. In otherwords, it's pretty unlikely that XHTML 2.0 will ever actually grace the IBM intranet (which is sad, because I wouldn't mind converting over)
what the hell is a 'junk character', anyway?
Of course, perfect control over layout is a pipedream on the web. It was never designed to do this. Even if you had the ability to do so on the server side, the user is still free to remake the "experience" in any way they want. Different default fonts; change default (or allowed) fontsizes; embed your page in some local css; very different screen resolutions and browser window sizes, and so on.
Now, this user control is a Good Thing. It means the web an be used with very different kinds of devices, and it means users with various impairments can access the info. Most vision-impaired users do not use screen readers, for example; for them it is sufficient to be able to set the font and size so they can read it.
If you want perfect control, make a PDF-document out of it.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.