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Digital Web Magazine - HTML5, XHTML2, and the Future of the Web

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Saved by 15 people (4 private), first by anonymouse user on 2007-04-10


Public Comment

on 2007-04-15 by ratbeard

Article about the future technologies that will form the backbone of the web, including:
  • XHTML 1.0  - IE handles xml documents as HTML, providing no advantage to delivering content in XHTML.
  • HTML5 - In development by the WHATWG, which is comprised of 3 of the 4 major browser vendors (guess which one is missing).  It seeks to define error-handeling for HTML parsers, so that browsers can handle ill-formed HTML in a consistant way.  Also adds many things developers have been wanting, such as persistent storage, form validation, the canvas tag, etc.  Backwards compatible, and likely to be the  standard to adopt.
  • XHTML 2.0 - currently in development by the W3C, corrects some of the problems of XHTML, but unlikely to see adoption for many years, due to the fact that:
  1. Poor support from Microsoft,
  2. Not backwards compatable with HTML or XHTML 1 - it uses an entirely different namespace. 
  3. Its not focused on developers like HTML5 is.

Public Sticky notes

While XHTML2 is a semantic improvement over XHTML 1.0, it does not seem likely that it will matter for web developers for a long time, especially when one considers that Internet Explorer still doesn’t offer XHTML 1.0 support.

Highlighted by ratbeard

The fact that Internet Explorer doesn’t really support XHTML as XML in any way, and the problems XML can cause when not all tools in the authoring chain are XML tools, means that there has been little incentive for using XML on the web. This is compounded by search engines not indexing XHTML as XML documents; very few XHTML authoring tools for XML; very few CMS or blogging tools supporting XML correctly all the way from input through database to generation; and very few ad suppliers supporting XML.

There is a little incentive if you want to allow MathML, SVG, and other XML applications to be interspersed inline in XHTML documents, but this use of XHTML as XML has found a very limited audience.

XHTML2 is XML

And therein lies the biggest problem. On top of all the concerns that web developers have about using XML for serving documents, XHTML2 adds another layer of complexity. It isn’t HTML 4.01 reformulated as XML; it’s a different but similar language, with added, removed, or modified semantics for many elements, and added or changed element vocabulary for many semantics. In many cases, the changes are steps in the right direction, but at the same time, XHTML2 was not built with web developers in mind. As an example, it doesn’t at all address the deficiencies of HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0 in the areas of interactivity, local storage, or script interactions.

Highlighted by garyedwards