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."

Comments

why some people are upset

[chongo]

• acronym tag is gone
• q tag is gone
• cite tag is gone
• img tag is gone (yes, really!)
• applet tag is gone (also really!)
• br tag is deprecated
• h1 thru h6 are deprecated
• etc ...

I can see why some people are questing the value of this standards proposal.

Re:why some people are upset

[JimDabell]

• acronym tag is gone

It was always misused anyway. An acronym is pronouncable.

• q tag is gone

...replaced with the <quote> element.

• cite tag is gone

...which was an editing mistake.

• img tag is gone (yes, really!)
• applet tag is gone (also really!)

They were only special cases of the <object> element anyway, which is still there, and far more flexible.

• br tag is deprecated

...in favour of the <line> element, which is much more in line with the fact that xhtml is a markup language and not a programming language.

• h1 thru h6 are deprecated

...because a single <h> element in the context of <section> elements is far more flexible.

Remember, they are called elements, not tags. The tags are the funny things in angle brackets, elements are the whole things.

The question remains, why are there deprecated elements in a non-backwards compatible markup language?

Re:why some people are upset

[Anonymous Coward]

If you use IE it's easy to miss the acronym tag, but in Mozilla and Opera acroynms are given a dotted underline. Government sites uses Acronym tags, and they are of great use to disabled people. For example, take the word snag. Do I mean to catch on something, or do I mean "sensitive new age guy"? Acronym clears up the ambiguity.

Differentiating speech marks from quote tags is useful for different languages.

Re:why some people are upset

[Anonymous Coward]

> On a specifications level? They were intimately involved in a couple of crucial recommendations, I believe, including CSS (which of course, originated within Opera).

Huh? What have you been smoking?

CSS was first proposed in 94. MS got on board first (which is why they're in on the recommendations) and had it in IE3 in 96, the first commercial browser with support. Netscape then gave up on its JavaScript Style Sheets and included CSS in Navigator 4. It wasn't until 98 that Opera included CSS.

The guy that invented CSS (Hakon Lie) later went to work for Opera but that was years after the standard was created and in wide use.

Re:Misguided, not mistaken

[Cokelee]

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.



First off, CSS support has been around since IE4 NS4.
Second, if you have Windows 98, you have IE4.
Third, Mozilla simply doesn't follow all CSS properties.

Re:Misguided, not mistaken

[DarkBlack]

First off, CSS support has been around since IE4 NS4.

Limited yes, but it is there.

Second, if you have Windows 98, you have IE4.

Sorry, not everyone does.

Third, Mozilla simply doesn't follow all CSS properties.

And neither does any other browser on the market at this time. However, aside from the horible float bugs in Mozilla, it does have the best CSS in any browser right now.

Re:Standards . . . HAH!

[JimDabell]

The word standard implies that it is unwaivering and uniform. XHTML is most definitely NOT that!

I don't believe the w3c has ever claimed xhtml as a standard. Or any of their html specifications either. I think the only "standard" html is ISO-HTML.

Re:Misguided, not mistaken

[mr3038]

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.

If you had ever read HTML 4.01 spec fully you would have noted how it suggested that object element should be used for all embedded objects. To quote w3c:

For example, to include a PNG image in a document, authors may write:

<BODY> <P>Here's a closeup of the Grand Canyon: <OBJECT data="canyon.png" type="image/png"> This is a <EM>closeup</EM> of the Grand Canyon. </OBJECT> </BODY>

Previous versions of HTML allowed authors to include images (via IMG) and applets (via APPLET). These elements have several limitations:

• They fail to solve the more general problem of how to include new and future media types.
• The APPLET element only works with Java-based applets. This element is deprecated in favor of OBJECT.
• They pose accessibility problems.

And now they have removed IMG and APPLET. Are you surprised?

About what comes to CITE, as many already noted that was simply an authoring mistake while making the draft and it has already announced on the mailing list that it'll be back in the next draft.

I think that anybody that says h1-h6 should be kept instead of SECTION and H elements doesn't simply know what she is talking about. The problem with Hx is that one can skip levels. If the headers were numbered by default it would be highly visible. I know many slashdotters do start their web page with H3 simply because "it looks better than that god-awful-huge h1". If the first header said "1.1.1. I'm the first header" even an idiot author would think something smells fishy. In addition, there's no way to tell where one section of document ends. They new way is to enclose sections inside SECTION elements. Those sections can be nested and section can contain header enclosed in a H element. Browser then uses the nesting depth of SECTIONs what enclose a single H element to decide the size the header should be rendered at.

Example:
<section><h>header1</h>foo
<section><h>header2</h>bar</section>
baz</section>

Note that "baz" belongs to logical section named "header1". You cannot represent a structure like this with H1-H6.

One possible rendering could be:
header1
foo
| header2
| bar
baz

But the truth is, this all really doesn't matter. People will continue to author HTML3.2, stick XHTML2 DOCTYPE identifier and serve the documents as text/plain, regardless of what the possible final spec will say. And they will complain if their cool frameset doesn't work. Those few of us who care to follow the recommendation can easily do it. Simply change those few remaining IMG elements to objects and upgrade your document structure to SECTION and H and you're pretty much done. If you feel adventureous you could start authoring XHTML2 pages immediatly and simply write the missing rendering instructions in the user stylesheet. Yeah, it might work in Mozilla only, but that can be used for testing and as a real world prototype.

If you want to bitch about something it should be that XForms are too complex, but anything is better than current HTML forms.