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The Future is XHTML 2.0
An anonymous reader writes "As with its past, the future of HTML will be varied, some might say messy, but I believe XHTML 2.0 will ultimately receive widespread acceptance and adoption. A big move in this direction will be in Embedded devices such as phones and digital TVs, which will have no need to support the Web's legacy of messy HTML, and are free to take unburdened advantage of XHTML 2.0. This Developer Works article examines the work of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in creating the next-generation version of their XHTML specification, and also their response to the demand for 'rich client" behavior exemplified by Ajax applications.'
digital TVs, which will have no need to support the Web's legacy of messy HTML, and are free to take unburdened advantage of XHTML 2.0
Digital TVs have no need to support XHTML 2.0 either. Maybe in the future they'll write their menus in XHTML 2, but why bother? No one is browsing their own TV as a server (although that might be a cool hack). TVs need custom interfaces, not web pages.
Developers: We can use your help.
I think it's time for the internet to stop catering to the past.
Can you imagine our interstates if we still catered to stage coaches, horse drawn carriages, and Model T's?
Can you imagine television if we still catered to black and white TV's?
Change happens. Get over it. It's not like Firefox cost's $3,995.00 per copy.
When people can no longer recognize the sites they like, they'll get the hint and upgrade.
It won't be sites like Amazon.com that bring about this change, it will be sites like HomeStarRunner.com, JibJab, that don't have billions of dollars in sales to lose, but can be just as influential in a grassroots way.
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It's HTML 5.
XHTML looks nice in theory, but HTML 5 is being designed for real world use. It can be sent with an xhtml mime-type too.
<h property="title">Welcome to my home page</h>
This denotes the heading as the XHTML 2.0 title of the document, and specifies it as the inline heading. Finally, an end to writing the title out twice in every document!
It seems to me that introduces it's own quirks...
<h property="title">Welcome to my home page</h>
<div property="title">Second title, what now?</div>
-William Shatner can be neither created nor destroyed.
Every so many years they come out with this new exciting standard that turns out to go nowhere. That is because technology isn't standards driven, it is standards that are freedom/technology driven. For example, Linux (in spite of all the distros) has done more to standardize the OS that all the POSIX standards committies and Motif (renember that one) and CDE (renember that one too) standards combined. Typically a good stnadard is one where people created it first to meet a need, everyone started using it, then the standards committie eventually get arround to formalizing it. If it doesn't happen in that order, it is most likely crap.
People who find XHTML hard probably aren't the kind of people who are crafting pages by hand anyway. WYSIWYG editors hide those details for them.
The laxer rules of HTML make it easier to write pages that aren't portable. If people can't handle XHTML, can you also expect them to realise their sloppy HTML will only work in the version of IE they're working with?
I totally agree. I recently worked at a web programming gig to put me through college/grad school and saw this exemplified quite well. HTML coders are not exactly the kind of people that follow the newest trend in programming abilities. I worked for a firm that designed huge sites for major clients, but most of us still used DHTML and *sometimes* CSS. This is after XHTML has been around for quite a while.
I'm sure there was a huge article on slashdot about how XHTML (1.0) was going to be great and revolutionize the web, but most of the HTML coders that I know really don't care to do something new if they know what they can do now works. What should be done is focusing on standardizing the browsers, _not_ jumping ahead to a new version when hardly anyone has adopted version 1.0.
Stop looking at this as a programmer and start looking at it as a web developer who doesn't care about cleanliness of code or efficiency -- it's HTML for god's sake.
"So in designing the next generation of cellphone websites you can saftly ignore old standards."
You mis-spelled 'daftly'. 8^)
Seriously, writing for specific devices is exactly what HTML was supposed not to do. It was designed to be platform and software-independant, able to be displayed equally well in a variety of methods, from CLI to Safari. Netscape and, later, Microsoft did there best to subvert this idea, in an attempt to bind the web to their particular browser implementations. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to decide the extent to which they succeeded.
But as far as the future is concerned, as a web applications developer, I honestly hope that I am never asked to write a 'cellphone website'. If I've done my job right, the same structure and a different style sheet should suffice to make my web content render properly on a different device.
But I must give credit where credit is due: While I don't know about ignoring 'old' standards, I do agree that XHTML 2.0 will be much better suited to the task of serving content to a much wider array of devices than any version of HTML ever has.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
That's probably where its going. My personal feeling however is that for things like phones and even business applications an efficient VNC-like client is the way to go, as X11 is already a huge overkill for these tasks as far as remote clients go. I see X11 as being useful as the server-side per-user virtual graphics engine which renders its output into a memory buffer which is then analysed for pixel changes, which are then compressed and transmitted to the client.
As long as there is more than one product that uses a specification or recommendation, there will be feature competition. Feature competition usually involves bending or breaking the rules to lure customers. To top that off, it isn't as simple as someone creating a completely compliant tool and releasing it. If it did happen, there is not any means to guarantee that it will achieve a sizable distribution. The average user just does not care enough.
In my experience, specifications and recommendations are best followed to the highest level that allows cross-product functionality. To follow something to the letter, will usually narrow the delivery target audience. However, specification and recommendations do well at augmenting style and standard practices - just as long as they guide and not define. ;-)
You are in a maze of little twisting passages, all different.
XHTML 2.0 may be the future, but it's certainly the very distant future. Especially when you consider that not only the current version, but also the upcoming version, of the worlds most popular web browser doesn't support XHMTL 1.1, and ony supports XHTML 1.0 when it is written in an HTML 4 compatible manner.
If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?
As far as the XHTML side, the main fix I see is that it will make it practically impossible for someone to write tag soup and call it XHTML2. First, serving as application/xhtml+xml is mandatory, and as Google published in their statistics, most so-called XHTML1 authors couldn't even manage that much. And second, the namespace is different from XHTML1, and a whole lot of elements have been completely changed, a whole lot were removed and a whole lot were added. This should mean that browsers, from the start, can say that invalid XHTML2 will not render.
And of course, once browsers simply refuse to render invalid content, you start getting improvements. People who want to write invalid content can use old HTML, and people who want the improved semantics can move onto XHTML2 without worrying that it will be polluted with invalid content which will eventually require them to write workarounds.
The CSS side is completely screwed still, though. In part because there is no real validation for the correctness of rendering beyond the Acid2 test.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!