The Future of HTML

An anonymous reader writes "HTML isn't a very good language for making Web pages. However, it has been a very good language for making the Web. This article examines the future of HTML and what it will mean to Web authors, browser and developers. It covers the incremental approach embodied by the WHATWG specifications and the radical cleanup of XHTML proposed by the W3C. Additionally, the author gives an overview of the W3C's new Rich Client Activity."

Comments

Re:JavaScript

[Anonymous Coward]

Javascript IS an object-oriented language. And fully-featured, except for things like lack of sockets.

Re:JavaScript

[starwed]

Javascript 2 is part of mozilla's roadmap, actually. ^_^ Check out some of Brendan Eich's blog entries.

CSS

[zoeblade]

CSS took the totally simple CENTER tag and "improved" it with kludgy auto-width margins that don't work in IE5/Win.

text-align: center;

What CSS does is seperate style from actual content, and also seperate style intended for monitors from, say, style intended for a printed copy of the page. Once you start to think in this mindset, it makes a lot more sense than using HTML to define both the content and style in the same place, all mixed in together.

It can also save a lot of time. For example, with CSS you can specify that every h1 element should be centered with a single line of code, which is much quicker than specifying the alignment of every single h1 element by hand in every page, one at a time.

That and it saves a lot of bandwidth, as each page can link to the same CSS file.

Re:CSS

[gallen1234]

I think you missed the gp's point. He wants to center a container object, not text or the text within a container. text-align is a text property. If you apply it to a container object the results won't be what you needed. Try an example with and see what you get for your trouble. The output won't be a table centered horizontally on the page.

Re:Round 2

[roman_mir]

Just to make life easier, use FF with dev-tools (when installing select to install with dev-tools,) this gives you the DOM inspector. For JS itself install Venkman