Slashdot Mirror
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.'
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.
I would have thought that if the devices didn't need to serve up web content, they would use a proprietary system that is best suited for the job. If they did serve up web content, than of course they should support HTML.
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
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.
Lose Weight and Feel Great with Isagenix
I'm not entirely familiar with XHTML 2.0 (we have code monkeys who concern themselves with this these days) but is this a case of the standards following the people who will or will not use this as is intended with a begging bowl in hand, or does it really address the many concerns surround HTML/XHTML/CSS?
The Mothership
Why is it that every new product has an 'X' attached to it?
XBox, XForms, XHTML, OSX, Windows XP, x86, xChat, X Multimedia System, Adium X, X drive, and it goes on and on.
So just slap an 'X' on it and instantly beam into the future!
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
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.
I believe XHTML 2.0 will ultimately receive widespread acceptance and adoption.
Yeah right, just like CSS2. and XHTML1.0... 'Adoption' is not just not exploding when encountering XHTML2.0 - it means full support for the entire standard. And unfortunately we're not there yet for standards which have been around for years. I don't see why things will go differently for XHTML2.0
but i have a hard time taking a guy named Edd Dumbill seriously.
The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.
-Oscar Wilde
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.
I thought Web 2.0 was the future?
Ow wait.. that's right.. that was LAST week's "future". So, shall we take bets on next week's "future"?
Ajax works in conjunction with:
Furthermore, the WHATWG are formally specifying the XMLHttpRequest interface, which they will probably submit to the W3C once complete.
In what way are these "versus" Ajax? Ajax works with standards, not against them.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
XHTML2.0 is nice. I would accept it immediately! But sadly this is not me and this is not you who decides what gets accepted... I'm a web developer and I'm supposed to do the best for my clients. My clients expect me to do the work in the way that the biggest audience available will be able to use it...
:-( )
I will not "accept" the XHTML2.0 as long as I'm not sure that my clients can loose any of potential visitors/customers.
The right question should go to the major browser providers:
"Hey, browser creators, when do YOU and YOUR COMPANIES accept the XHTML2.0?"
(I'm afraid that it is too many years ahead to be worried about
Well, I've got to get back to work. When I stop rowing, the slave ship just goes in circles.
Who cares if your HTML is messy?
People with disabilities who use screen readers, people with slow connections who would rather not download content with all the "fat" that HTML provides, and possibly even the standards-compliant browsers of the future - that's who.
Why bother writing a webpage if you're going to ignore your audience by taking the "who cares? don't look at it!" approach. If you and only you will be reading your page, then the idea of a progressive approach to compliance does not apply to you anyway.
Last I checked w3c complient browsers had less than 20% of the market share. Until IE is either updated or dead, the web is pretty frozen. Don't expect anything to change with IE 7 either.
Microsoft knows that the web is the only real forseeable threat to their operating system. What do you need windows for if you can run your rich business applications on a platform independent web browser?
I believe this a real conflict of interest that should have been addressed in all of the anti-trust hearings. Oh wait, nothing changed even after they were found to be a monopoly...
Change isn't going to happen easily
Here we go again. "Thin client is the future!" -- "No the users demand bloated clients with millions of animated doodads!" .. "No wait, the thick client is a mess full of security holes!" -- "No, the server-side processing and thin clients are future, again" -- "No, wait, the rich contents thick like a brick clients are the future!" --
[interlude] Bah, "the client-server paradigm" is the future! [/interlude]
Seriously though, thin, simple and reliable client coupled with powerful server-side processing is the staple of reliablity and usually the highest performance and security. The "rich client" is a fancy word for going back to "everybody needs a huge multimedia client (i.e a 23GHz CPU 3-core phone) to access this page with 4 lines of text on it!" and fat servers because the clients although bloated and huge are too dumb to do anything besides being pretty and acting like the swiss cheese of security. I think we've been there before, and it was called ActiveX, no?
Well, yes AJAX != Standards, depending on the standards.
AJAX is inline with all relevant technical standards ( (X)HTML, CSS, ECMAScript (except for MSIE), XML, etc...)
The fundamental standards that Ajax fails at meeting are USABILITY standards, specifically the notion of the web as a series of pages. Ajax violates this page metaphor, which has some usability gurus in minor fits of apoplexia, Jakob Nielsen included. Adhering to these standards is, imho, much more open to interpretation though. Case in point, many users like these AJAX web apps, Flickr for example. If users like it, then why are some of the usability folk, self proclaimed "user advocates", having said fits? Personally, I think it's time for the page metaphor to evolve, and clearly so does a large portion of web users.
As noted on the IE blog, IE 7 won't support the "application/xml+xhtml" MIME type. That means that all of your XHTML 2.0 documents will still need to be sent as "text/html", and will thus be parsed as HTML. Yay, progress!
Sounds like, when they say "future", they mean "fuuuuuuuuuuture".
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?
...is it Web 2.0 compliant?
We can't fight IE's predominance so lets join forces and extend frontpage beyond the imagination!!!! yay!!!
***Game Over***Insert Coin***
Just wanted to point this out:
XHTML2 -- with navigation lists, links on any element, sections and headings -- is optimized for web documents.
HTML5, officially Web Applications 1.0 -- with canvas, a drag and drop API, and XMLHTTPRequest standardization -- is optimized for web applications.
CSS3 is going to be extremely cool.
Ajax violates this page metaphor, which has some usability gurus in minor fits of apoplexia, Jakob Nielsen included.
AJAX doesn't have to violate the page metaphor, and I actually haven't seen any real examples of people destroying usability like people are running around yelling about. Yes it would be _possible_ to replace all navigation in your site with AJAX just as people have replaced all the navigation in their sites with a Flash menu, but the technology doesn't force you to improperly use it. If your front page has a stock ticker that dynamically updates, is that breaking usability? Also there are certain places you don't want the user to be able to bookmark, like the third page in a five page form they are filling out. The user thinks "Hey I'll just bookmark here and finish this later". Instead you could save the state of everything entered so far and return back to the position they left off at a later point with cookies, and your web app actually knows what's going on. All five pages of the form have the same url (http://www.mysite.com/survey/) so there is no confusion.
XHTML 2 is doomed to remain forever "in the bright future" of geeks, where noone cares for compatibility and real technology benefits, but is entirely consumed by semantics and how pretty his code is.
Look at the benefits if XHTML2 and compare it to HTML5, and you'll quickly see why WHATWG was formed.
As HTML5 offers answers to actual problems in web development, and offers backwards compatibility, XHTML2 pointlessly restructures the language, making it harder to read in the process (quick: count the nested sections spread accross pages of text to guess the heading level you're at).
Also while the author dreams about our XHTML2 future, the next major release of the dominant browser on the market (IE7) doesn't even support XHTML 1.0 yet. And this is the browser that most people will use in the next 5-6 years at least.
The author also calls XHTML's semantics better. This is subjective. HTML5 also offers more semantical tags, but according to my practise, it'll be easier to build sites styled with CSS in HTML5 than XHTML2. XHTML2 doesn't have better semantics, it just has different semantics. HTML5 is the one with better semantics IMHO, that build on top of HTML4.
No major browser supports XHTML2, but they support parts of HTML5 (like the canvas tag, invented by Apple's Safari browser, and included in the spec by WHATWG).
I won't even comment the section about XHTML2 "toys" because the subject is serious.
In conclusion I'll say that it's not likely XHTML2 will become a supported standard while most of us are alive, so better concentrate on good HTML4/XHTML1/CSS/JS/SVG/Flash code and applications, and follow the developments at WHATWG.
XHTML is not rigid - it simply takes the old HTML 4 tags and adds a few constraints, so that the resulting document is XML-compliant. Its readability isn't affected, it's easy to look at the structure of the document, the learning curve from HTML 4 is minimal, and it makes parsing it much much simpler as there is a well-defined document structure.
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.
It's probably because there are tradeoffs with any approach:
1) thin client - low demands on end user hardware, but heavily dependant on working central server. One point of failure for many users (server) and one place to concentrate attacks - server must be very robust because it is a single, fixed, information rich target.
2) thick client - high demands on end user hardware, and a maintainance nightmare for tech support. The security situation will vary widely between individual setups. However, a failure of one machine causes only limited damage, and doesn't impair other machines. If desired (e.g. home hobby applications) a high degree of self reliance is possible.
Different situations require different solutions. There are intermediate solutions, like a client which doesn't maintain any of the software but does have its own graphics acceleration hardware, in order to avoid straining the server's resources when running something like a CAD or raytracer program. The trick, of course, is what constitutes the "best fit solution." And there is no one answer to that.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
Personally, I'm still waiting for XHTML 1.0.
Seriously, how many pages currently on the web would survive a simple XML validation? Most commercial tools I've seen, even those current, make no real attempt to break away from HTML 4 + cute junk standard. And XHTML 1.0 was introduced in January 2000...
Until the browsers that constitute the bulk of the market share support this kind of thing in a meaningful way, it's doomed. Period.
One way to move this stuff along would be a develop a fully compliant plugin for current browsers that could support standards in spite of the platform. Once it's clear you need 3rd party tools to support what's supposedly a web standard, maybe the bigger browsers will be guilted into supporting it natively.
I'd love to see something like XHTML 2.0 adopted with gusto, but if history is any indication then something major will have to change.
Actually, the XP in "Windows XP" is an emoticon.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
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?
I'm amazed at how immature some of my /. friends' friends can be.
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.