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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.'
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.
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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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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
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"?
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?
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".
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.
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.