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W3C Considering An HTML 5
An anonymous reader writes "When the decision was initially made to move in the direction of XHTML, instead of a new version of HTML proper, it seemed like a good idea. Years later and the widespread adoption of CSS (among other things) has proven that things don't always develop the way we expect. As a result, HTML 5 has been revived by the W3C. After some lobbying and continued work by the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group, the old web markup language is getting an official face-lift. A post to the Webforefront blog explains the history behind the initial decision to move to XHTML, and why things are so different in the here and now."
Actually HTML5 is largely a result of work by the main browser makers, except Microsoft I believe. Hixie from Opera is the project lead of the WhatWG which was created to extend HTML to make it more applicable for web applications. It fixes a lot of the problems with both HTML 4 and XHTML, and its backwards compatible with *both*.
This is not the HTML5 W3C is talking about. They want to make their own. And just like XHTML1.1 and especially XHTML2, I suspect it'll be largely bullshit.
Microsoft is working on XHTML support in IE8 now, and right at this point W3C comes out and says "ok XHTML wasn't exactly what we needed". Idiotic.
Now that we know W3C doesn't know what they're doing (or what we're doing), maybe we can finally see a better push of the set of technologies in WHATWG's HTML5. It's actually a pretty neat standard and a proper superset of HTML4, adding stuff we sorely missed since the web came into being.
You see, W3C is about "semantics and clean code" to aid computer based search. Google says they don't know what they're doing. I'd trust the search engine vendor to know better. WHATWG is about practical solutions to existing problems, without throwing away what we already have.