XHTML 2 Cancelled

Jake Lazaroff writes "According to the W3 News Archive, the charter for the XHTML2 Working Group — set to expire on December 31st, 2009 — will not be renewed. What does this mean? XHTML2 will never be a W3C recommendation, so get on the HTML 5 bandwagon now. According to the XHTML FAQ, however, the W3C does 'plan for the XML serialization of HTML to remain compatible with XML.' Looks like with HTML 5, we'll get the best of both worlds."

Comments

CSS 3 spec

[Piata]

More importantly, when are they going to finish the CSS3 spec?

I love that HTML5 is getting pushed to the forefront and browsers are advancing more than ever, but as a web designer that CSS3 spec needs to get done and pushed on the browser developers because it will be another 2 - 5 years before mass adoption and I'm pretty tired of CSS2.1's limitations.

Re:XHTML merged

[Phroggy]

But, XHTML has corrected many wrong thing that HTML developpers used to do.

No it hasn't! Writing valid code (be it HTML 4.01, XHTML, or HTML 5) and checking it with a validator is what has corrected many wrong things that HTML developers used to do. Valid HTML 4.01 is still just as legitimate as XHTML ever was.

Re:XHTML merged

[Phroggy]

XHTML would have been great standard.

When fed invalid XHTML, the browser chokes, which would have gone a long way to eliminating much of the crap code, and crap "web developers" out there.
I don't see why it's the browsers business to be THAT lenient, and second guess the developer all the time.

The problem is, a lot of web pages today are not a single coherent document, they're a bunch of little code fragments concatenated together (template, content, advertising, etc.). When coders get sloppy, this can result in invalid markup. When browsers choke, the content producer may have no idea how to fix the problem - it may not even be their problem.

What HTML5 tries to do is clearly define exactly how broken markup is supposed to be handled, so all browsers can try to "second guess the developer" in exactly the same way.

Kudos to Firefox for reigniting the browser war. In Browser War 2.0, all the major players are striving toward standards compliance, trying to bring their behavior in line with a single unified goal instead of adding their own proprietary features to HTML itself. Five years from now, when IE6 and IE7 are as distant a memory as IE4 and IE5 are now, web development is going to be a lot easier.

Re:Good

[Hurricane78]

The main key is, that, while HTML5 is based on the superior SGML (because of more freedom), XHTML had started to enforce strictness and cleanness. This meant the browser did not have to support a ton of typos, just because the editor was a freakin' lazy ass. Imagine a compiler that would eat any typo. Missing brackets, braces, semicolons, object-function separators, completely meaningless semantic messes. HTML4 browsers eat it all.

It is horrible, and actively supports the dumbing down of people. (Those who want to write websites.)
Face it: If they have to, they will learn it. Nobody is too stupid for that. Some just repeat so often that they are stupid, that they actually become stupid. But this can be reversed in exactly the same way. (Ask any psychotherapist about self-fulfilling prophecies.)

Another great feature of XHTML, was its modularity and cross-language features.
You could integrate XHTML, SVG, MathML, etc, into one document. Imagine a P tag inside a SVG circe, containing a math formula, and you begin to understand the sheer power of that concept.

Now if they implement HTML5 right, and we get the same cleanness that XHTML 1.1 had (Strict only. No transitional shit.), and they add cross-language abilities too (trough SGML), then I'm all for it!
But if not, this could be a huge step backwards, into the web development mess of IE6 times!

Re:XHTML merged

[TheRaven64]

Getting a web page clean is a hard problem ... when you accept user input in something approaching HTML format, like /. does.

No it isn't. You should not ever, ever, be inserting user-provided HTML directly in to a document. If you do, then well done, you've just created a cross-site scripting vulnerability. And you've let pranksters submit &lt!-- and hide half of your page.

The correct way of handling user-provided HTML is to parse it with an HTML parser, construct a DOM tree, navigate this stripping out any tags that aren't on your whitelisted set, and then use the result. Most of the time, you want to run it through a very relaxed HTML parser because hand-typed HTML in a web form is likely to be full of errors. When you dump the DOM tree as HTML, it can be XHTML 1, HTML 3.2, or any other dialect you want.

Re:No more compound documents?

[Bogtha]

Take a look at the current draft of HTML 5. You'd be hard-pressed to find anything presentation-related.

I think this attitude is more a case of wishful thinking and sometimes outright denial rather than than reality. Take a look at some of these, for instance:

1. <br> and <pre> - explicitly control line-breaking (<pre> has ASCII art as a use case!).
2. <ul> and <ol> - the order of HTML elements already forms part of their semantics. The real reason both element types are kept around is because one is numbered and one is not.
3. <small> - nuff said.
4. <i> - I'll quote this, because it's utterly laughable: "The i element represents a span of text in an alternate voice or mood, or otherwise offset from the normal prose, such as a taxonomic designation, a technical term, an idiomatic phrase from another language, a thought, a ship name, or some other prose whose typical typographic presentation is italicized." - or, in other words, "let's list every case we can think of where using italics is the typographical convention so we can pretend it isn't an element type that means use italics." Are there any real shared semantics between a ship name and a thought? No, they just want to use italics.

Re:Good

[css-hack]

But by working that way, the computer encourages people to create unreadable messes, that other developers can't easily understand.

Simpler parsing rules are more a boon for the people than for the computers. Think about it.

Re:Good

[ultranova]

So, what you're saying is that the computer works for people instead of the other way around?

No, what it means is that the computer tries to guess what some dyslexic jackass who insists on writing code despite being functionally illiterate and proud of it meant. Since we have no sentient computers yet, and since the markup diarrhea these people produce would be challenging even for a human to decrypt, the task is hopeless, and the websites that result will break in fascinating ways with each new browser version, or whenever whoever visits them has a different screen resolution than the "designer", or the stars are not just right. And whenever that happens, the website gets replaced by a new, equally broken version, and the designer gets paid for delivering said abomination.

And of course whenever the browser fails to extract meaning from the chaos that would horrify even Cthulhu, it's the user who gets blamed: he didn't use the right version of the right browser, running at the right resolution, with the right versions of the right plugins installed. That, or he has Linux installed on another and unrelated machine.