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HTML to be 'Incrementally Evolved'
MrDrBob writes "It has been decided that HTML is going to be incrementally updated, as the W3C believe that their efforts with XHTML are going unnoticed or unused by many websites out there. HTML is going to be worked on in parallel with XHTML (but with no dependencies), with the W3C trying to evolve HTML to a point where it's easier and logical for everybody to transition to XHTML. However, their work is still going to attempt to improve HTML in itself, with work on forms moving towards transitioning into XForms, but bearing in mind the work done by Webforms. In addition, the W3C's HTML validator is going to get improved, with Tim Berners-Lee wanting it to 'check (even) more stuff, be (even) more helpful, and prioritize carefully its errors, warning and mild chidings'. This looks like a nice step forward for the W3C, and will hopefully leave all the squabbling and procrastination behind."
We cannot have new HTML without upgrading the best part of the web.
Example of server side blink
Wonderful!?
liqbase
What practical effect will this have? As long as browsers will render junk (X)HTML most people won't bother with an updated standard any more than they do the present one. Learning any proper coding system is work. What's the incentive other than pride in the craft? Firefox, IE, etc. make learning standards optional, which is just another word for more work.
I don't really see how this will improve the chances of their standards being adopted. It's not exactly like the leap from html to xhtml is all that confusing as is. This will just be even more confusing. Good luck getting all of the major browsers to support all of these incremental changes when they can't even keep up with the standards suggested years ago.
Then make sure that the content added by the user is well-formed before adding it to the site.
HTML doesn't serve its purpose, because it doesn't mandate a lack of separation between content and style. For one, that means that it's difficult to process HTML pages with semantic tools. One of my favourite recent reads has been Visualising the Semantic Web ed. Geroimenko and Chen (Springer Verlag, 2005), which shows the rich possibilities of extracting information and transforming it, such as into a graphical display, or reorganizing it. This is all a cinch with any valid XHTML Strict page, but as long as we're stuck in HTML 4.01, these abilities will never be widely available to us.
Furthermore, creators of accessibility software are constantly marching uphill. Just yesterday the BBC had a report on how hard it is for blind users to use most plain HTML websites.
HTML has been and continues to be "Good Enough". If there were some truly compelling reason to upgrade to something else most already would have. When image tags were introduced, people abandoned lynx rather quickly, the same goes for transparent gif support, CSS, etc. Its nice to try to bring order or whatever the goal of xhtml is but frankly if its got the ability to slap some text on page, embed and image and throw in a pretty background its good enough for most people, they know it, they are comfortable with it and they arent going to change without a really compelling reason.
I believe that this is a response to the actions of the WHATWG (Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group) (X)HTML 5 and to Bjoern Hoehrmann leaving the W3C QA.
So it's not a new pie-in-the-sky idea like XForms or XHTML2, but something much more likely to be useful to web developers that need to work in a world where IE is (still) the biggest fish.
There's a hidden treasure in Python 3.x: __prepare__()
If your web site is part of a federal contract, it has to be compliant.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_508
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
Develop a few *actual* applications where the XML-compliance of XHTML is actually useful in an observable way, and everybody will start producing XHTML compliant code for new websites, lest they be left out from a new revolution on the web.
As long as the benefits are just hypothetical (with XHTML somebody could develop useful parsing applications based on commodity XML parsers), try actually developing some such apps that generate real, observable value today, and you'll start convincing people who don't care about standards for their own sake.
I do generally try to stick to XHTML 1.0, since I care about standards and ease of parsing, but the majority of people don't, and they are the target audience the W3C needs to work on convincing.
If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough. (Alan Kay)
Without iframes (currently supported by IE, Firefox and Opera, at least) 4.01 Strict isn't workable for most sites that rely on third-party content for advertising -- eg, ads from Amazon. And that's a large chunk of the web.
Ph-nglui mglw'nafh Gates M'dna wgah'nagl fhtagn.
> Isn't XHTML suppose to be a transition path to XML?
No, no, and still no. It is a specific application of XML.
HTML is dead. It's been superceded by XHTML for years now.
HTML was a good idea with some rough edges. It took XHTML to smooth some of them out. Specs that are less vague, more complete, and leave less to interpretation will fix more problems in the future.
XHTML is simpler than HTML (contrary to popular belief) because the syntax and structure is more consistent than HTML. You don't have to wonder whether you need a closing a tag: all tags get closed. All attributes get quoted. All tag names and attributes are lower case. It's really not that hard; if you don't want to do it because you can't read it anymore (you capitalization whore), that's what syntax highlighting is for. You just have to put forth a tiny bit of effort to make turn these rules into instinct.
There are two reasons why the transition to XHTML hasn't happened:
As long as browsers try to interpret messy markup, few people are going to care. It's the "good enough" attitude. "Quirks mode" is the big bad here. Browsers and visual authoring tools need to tell users that the page they are looking at is non-conformant and warn that it may not behave correctly. No other softare on the planet is as forgiving of the data it handles as web browesers.
If GCC still compiled C code when curly braces, paretheses, and quote marks are omitted at random, how much shittier would all the C code in the world be?
At least the W3C is doing something about the quagmire, but working in parallel is just a waste of time. Let HTML be, it's old and busted. XHTML is the new hotness. The W3C can spew out all the Recommendations (the flimsient of terms) it wants, but no one is going to care unless there's some enforcement at the other end of the line.
One thing the W3C needs to do is get off the semantic web high horse; it's putting the cart before the horse. They need to evangelize correctness, and the semantic web (plus other aspects) will follow naturally.
So, all you so called "developers" and "designers", keep on churning out your HTML 4.01 Transitional pages (or let Dreamweaver do it for you) with bloated table layouts. You'll keep contributing to the problem.
This requirement isn't just bureaucratic mumbo jumbo. Ensuring that all (valid) XML documents follow rules like this is what makes them so easy to parse quickly and unambiguously.
There are automated tools (e.g., Tidy) that will do most of the work for static pages. But there really aren't "thousands of pages" to deal with; the HTML to XHTML conversion process is pretty simple.The real problems with XHTML are:
- It makes some common idioms, notably including embedded Javascript code, much more awkward to write correctly.
- There's no payoff for most sites.
Item 2 is the real killer. If everyone is happily parsing "tag soup" HTML, which is often not compliant to any standard, why jump through the hoops (however easy those jumps might be) to comply with a standard that brings no immediate benefit?When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.