Slashdot Mirror
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."
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"
On an organisational level? Little, I believe, it certainly doesn't seem like Microsoft's participation in the w3c is putting forth the typical Microsoft nastiness.
On a specifications level? They were intimately involved in a couple of crucial recommendations, I believe, including CSS (which of course, originated within Opera).
On a day-by-day basis? Tantek Ãelik is usually found hanging around the w3c mailing lists and commenting on current affairs in his blog. He seems like a smart guy, he worked on IE5/Mac, which was one of the first decent CSS1 implementations.
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.
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.