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W3C's New XHTML 2.0 Draft A Mistake?
EchoMirage writes "The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has been quietly working on drafts for a proposed XHTML 2.0 standard. But some well-known and well-respected web authors are balking at the proposal, because it invalidates several well-used tags. Given that XHTML 1.1 hasn't even seen any wide use yet, and many browsers are still working on basic HTML 4 and CSS1 compatibility, many people are questioning the W3C's push to create new standards before the old ones are solidly in place."
Just set the standard I say. If no one is following them it is not theiir fault.
I can see why some people are questing the value of this standards proposal.
chongo (was here)
I'd agree with Zeldman on this one. They need to rename it to something else, and do some sort of forking, because switching terminology in midstream (for no appreciably visible reason) is simply not a good idea. I can see that it makes a certain amount of logical sense to convert images to objects, etc. ... but getting rid of H* tags and, as Mark mentioned, CITE? There isn't really anything to replace that kind of semantic markup, which is unfortunate.
I do remember reading some other stuff by IBM on this, and it was a fairly cogent explanation of the reasoning, but I still don't agree with the theories behind the changes.
I wouldn't mind most of the changes myself, but it will take decades for this standard to replace the current version if they drop compatibility. I'm sure that a few days afterwards Mozilla will have support for it, but the massive numbers of people who haven't yet upgraded to CSS-capable browsers tell me that we might see a few sites using XHTML 2 in, say, 2010.
got standards? --- http://www.w3.org/
The word standard implies that it is unwaivering and uniform. XHTML is most definitely NOT that! />
oops, just used a <br
Damnitall, well be seeing websites with HTML 4.0 forever.
Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera, Kde, etc., etc.. Screw the interface of your browser! Just get the dammed thing to display pages consistently with the law of the internet!
Then again, the law has no teeth, you abide because "you're supposed to."
Or that's what I get from it at least.
the creation of a new standard doesnt mean that everyone has to start using it immediately. thats what the !DOCTYPE tag is for. browsers are supposed to parse that and display the content based on the html/hxtml version specified.
Gyrate Dot Org - "Where high-tech meets low-life"
welll
maybe we shouldn't try to fix HTML.
perhaps it's just time to
screw all backward compatability
and make a
small
simple
modular
markup language
from scratch
with a well defined way to do scripts and other dynamic things from the beginning
monkeys.
Mark is missing -- or perhaps deliberately obscuring -- the point of XHTML 2.0.
XHTML 1.0 made HTML 4.0 into an XML language, by requring that you close all tags you open and quote all attributes, and that's pretty much it. Anyone who has ever tried to write code to manipulate HTML in middleware or on the client end will see the point of making sure that the markup is syntactically well-formed.
XHTML 1.1 with modularization breaks XHTML up into modules; modularization is a key idea in building extensible systems of any type, and it is put to good use in HTML. You get a tables module, a forms module, etc. There is now modularization for both DTD-based XML and XML Schema-based XML, so you can get your job done either way.
But the real goal is to make the modules well enough defined and have the semantics and the presentation and the underlying infrastructure (what is a link, when does it get followed, what are events, etc) all well enough separated so that HTML can become just another application of XML, without a lot of special knowledge hard-coded into browsers about what "i m g" or "b r" or "r e l" means. In other words, the goal is to define modules of functionality in XML, and then be able to use those together with other modules (things like SVG ) in kind of the same way that people can use class libraries in PHP and Java and other systems, without having to have someone write a new browser for every possible combination.
Remember how years ago during the browser wars, vendors kept inventing their own tags and writing browsers that understood the tags? Well, now we've got enough of all that figured out to be able to factor the web and its interfaces into a bunch of different parts, and then let you mix and match those parts together to make your own cogent language. You use CSS for presentation styling, XML Events for events, and markup for semantically describing the content. If you have to build your own language for displaying your weblog and call it RSS, well you just go do that and you put your tags in a namespace named by your favorite URI, and you go off. You and your friends (and enemies) can write CSS style sheets or XSLT transformations or what-have-you to display the resulting pointy bracket file in a browser, and it will look and act indistinguishable from today's HTML, but will offer other advantages -- blind people will be able to use their style sheets for reading it, and programs will be able to parse the format without having to screen-scrape the HTML, and you won't have to have six versions of it around for different devices and so on.
So after we move all of the essential stuffness of the web (events, hyperlinks, object embedding, forms, styling) into their own standards and get browsers and other user agents have to hard-code those implementations, what you're left with is a need for a common semantic markup language where things are clearly expressed and easy to write.
That's where tags like <section> and <h> come from, and why they make perfect sense as transitions from <h*>.
In summary, XHTML 2.0 is just the meaning-laden parts of web pages that are left over after all of the plumbing has been moved out to other specs, where it can be shared.
I'm all for using XHTML, and have been doing so for at least a year now. Mostly the Transitional part, but it's still XHTML. However, these new standards are being defined much too fast for the real world to catch up. Backwards compatibility will really go away with 2.0, so it will be YEARS until major sites are fully compliant.
Might I suggest that the focus move to stuff like, say, SOAP? It's a good little proposal, but the W3C moves SOOOO slowly there that Microsoft and other large companies just go ahead and implement their own extensions, which will then find their way into the standards later - much like the chaos that was HTML 3.2 (shudder!). The end result? Crappy standards, to the detriment of most of us.
So if anyone from the W3C happens to be reading this (not likely, I know), *PLEASE* focus your energy on where the action is *AT THE MOMENT*.
Black holes are where God divided by zero
It wasn't so long ago that the W3C couldn't keep up with the pace of change. Netscape and Microsoft were adding elements like the dreaded <BLINK> and features like tables, while the HTML DTD's languished in draft form. Now the W3C are the ones pulling ahead, while everyone else struggles to implement the last generation of their specifications.
Chris
I'm glad that XHTML 2.0 is no longer backwards compatible. Given that it's not, fixing known problems with the HTML vocabulary is a good idea.
Why do I dislike XHTML 1.0's backwards compatibility? XHTML 1.0 encouraged authors to serve XHTML as text/html, the same MIME type as legacy HTML. Furthermore, it didn't provide any guidelines for how browsers should decide whether something served as text/html should be handled using an XML parser. (Had XHTML 1.0, right from the start, decreed that any HTML document begining with "<?xml " be treated as XHTML, the problem might have been avoided.) Some authors (although not that many) started writing XHTML right after the spec came out, thinking it was the cool new thing to be doing. This meant that there was already a good bit of invalid XHTML as text/html on the web before any user agents could start parsing it as XML and enforcing the strict error handling that is one of the main advantages of XML.
I have a couple of comments on this.
1) Most of these changes have been antcipated for a long time. applet has been deprecated sine HTML 4.0. The functionality of the H/Section tags is much better than H1-6. The formatting aspects of H1-6 can easily be accomplished through CSS. The same can be said for all of the symantic tags like cite, acronym, quote and so on. Use XML to create your own tags and CSS to give them formatting. Then use whatever engine, it may nto be a browser, to handle your new tags in whatever way is neccesary. There are so many possible specific instances that browsers can't, and shouldn't, be required to handle all of them.
2) Knowing that it will take a while before the standards are adopted, whatever they are, is all the more reason to come out with standards that are so different from the current standards. If you try to make small incremental fixes through standards recomendations, you will languish in constant browser lag time and nothing substantial will change in a uniform way. Instead you will get browser manufacturers creating their own tags to handle these situations and they will undoubtedly be incompatible with other browsers.
This a good thing. Prepare for the standards to be implemented now, so you won't be caught off guard when browsers finally start implementing them.
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
Imagine you already have a website with hundreds of files and you have spent huge amount of time making it W3C compatible, now you heard that W3C is planning to drop several tags you have extensively used, what will you feel? No matter how superior the changes are from a technological point of view, you will have complaints, I think that's part of the mood the original article contains. Doing things without backward compatibility is always superior on purely technical basis, yet people often reluctant to do so. It's all about balancing between how much can be gain and how much the web society has to pay for the new (non-backward compatible) changes. So merely stating that the changes are technologically good is not a sufficient argument for the change.
By the time you manage to read through the standard XHTML 3.0 will be out.
w3c standards always read like RFC's written by martians, if RFC's wern't hard enough to read.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
presumably you are already a member
Otherwise they way they conduct their business is kind of none of your business.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
There is absolutely no change required for legacy documents.
That's what Content-Type: text/html
and <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
are for.
If you have just validated your website then the DOCTYPE will be present, requiring no more effort on your part.
HTML has evolved into itself.
That doesn't preclude an XHTML Revolution.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
That's the major problems with designing a site. It's not that XHTML 2.0 is getting here too fast, it's that big corporations are still using Netscape 4.6 and that whatever site you design needs to work well with that version.
That's the trajedy. Maybe in 5 years, government and big coporations will increase their requirements regarding the version number of the browser that needs to be supported.
I still fail to see the reason why change is needed. There are billions of websites out there, and they all seem to work fine for me. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Long live HTML 4.01 :D
I've never seen such nicely formatted comments on slashdot before!!!