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

It wont ever leave.

[Sinryc]

Why should something leave that is so simple to use, and something so many people know? Hell, I can slap up a little page with HTML in about 20 minutes, but I can't do it in anything else.

Decent overview of WHATWG

[dolphinling]

As someone on the WHATWG mailing list (I'm actually on the list of contributors for WF2, though for minor things), I'd say this is a decent overview of what WHATWG's doing. I expected something about XHTML 2, though, and a comparison.. I guess that's part 2 of the "two-part series".

HTML Did Quite Well

[MoThugz]

The one thing that the author missed is the "Intention" behind HTML. It was invented primarily to create documents (hence, the availability of h1 to h6 tags as the article illustrates). Furthermore, HTML is oh so accomodating and expandable.

Basically, every example that the author's given can already be replicated using current web technologies albeit via plugins and some scripting (server side and/or client side).

Not bad for a language that was primarily intended to generate documents now, is it? I fail to see why the author chooses to make it very clear at the start of his writeup about how "clunky" and "unsophisticated" HTML is, but concluded it by saying how current innovations like AJAX is already making HTML5 obsolete.

Nice writeup, but no clear objectives.

HTML is fine

[NittanyTuring]

HTML is fine. CSS is great. It's everything inside of that needs cleaning.

Re:pick a standard

[PapayaSF]

I'm all for new features, but I wouldn't hold up CSS as a model. Sometimes it seems like it goes out of its way to make things difficult for anyone writing a web page. Example: CSS took the totally simple CENTER tag and "improved" it with kludgy auto-width margins that don't work in IE5/Win. (Yes, I know that's Microsoft's fault, but even if it was reliable it'd seem like a step backwards.) And if you want to center something vertically, it's back to tables.

Want to use CSS to create a standard two- or three-column layout plus footer that works cross-platform? Have fun! Something that nearly every web coder needs to do all the time ought to be easy. Instead, it's considered a difficult problem even by authors of CSS books.

But hey, we can now put overlines over type! Everybody's been eagerly awaiting that feature, right? How about a future HTML that addresses the needs of those who actually create web pages?