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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."
It was always misused anyway. An acronym is pronouncable.
They were only special cases of the <object> element anyway, which is still there, and 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?
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:
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.
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Spelling and grammar mistakes left as an exercise for the reader.