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."

Comments

Hey that's great

[Iamthefallen]

Now just convince the gazillions of bad webdesigners out there to actually use the standard, any standard, please?

Re:Great, in about five years

[reaper20]

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.

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 /. could save alot of money just by switching to existing standards.

A few notes...

[Viqsi]

For one thing, the heirarchal menus thing is probably referring to the element, which is really just good semantic markup for lists of links; it's along similar lines to

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.

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 /. 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?)