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."

Please upgrade BLINK

We cannot have new HTML without upgrading the best part of the web.

Example of server side blink [blartwendo.com]

Wonderful!?

HTML is broken

HTML should go in a direction where content and form are truly separated. Have a document (or part of a document) mark the content in a purely logical fashion (like XML) and another document (or another part of the document) describe a presentation and which parts of the content to use where in that presentation.

HTML relies too much on the order of the content for presentation. It should be more like the workflow in a DTP program: Add a text box to the layout, then fill it with text.

More focus on standard the most will ignore.

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.

A Waste of Time

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.

Re:A Waste of Time

Agreed. I don't see how incremental changes is going to do anything but produce more versions of legacy HTML to worry about in X years time when everyone should be using XHTML already.

There are plenty of other things the W3C could work on. How about they spend some time extending 'forms' (which are essentially just embedded controls) to incorporate more complex widgets like embedded video viewers or audio players? I'm sick of being a Linux user and hitting pages that use some strange flash/activex player system or something thats sized in a pop up explicitly for Windows Media Player's browser plug in.

They wouldn't actually have to produce anything using native widgets, just a set of standards regarding embedded video player sizes (and perhaps basic layout formats) that implementors could follow, and suggest a standard for styling this via CSS and controlling it via javascript.

The web is more than just hypertext now, people expect media, but as it stands theres a dozen different ways to embed things like video it into a web page unlike images and the old faithful <img> tag. I say if it can work for images it can work for video and sound, and even flash and we can do away with alot of this activex and netscape embedded junk.

Back on getting people to move to XHTML, I blame schools, the various courses i've been on that mention HTML still talk of it as a series of tag's in vaguely the right order rather than explaining the concept of XML, nesting or CSS.

let's create another group

I welcome the idea that at last the W3C has get down from their high views and realize that most of the web is HTML and unless the web browsers are able to understand new markups the web developers can't use them. So instead of forcing everyone to dump everything they know the right approach is to fix existing problems in the current specs and move them forward to such ideal world step by step.

But I don't like the tone of the message itself as it refers to the WHATWG:

An issue was the formation of the breakaway WHAT WG, which attracted reviewers though it did not have a process or specific accountability measures itself.

As the WG is currently formed by developers from 3 of the 4 browsers engines, it would be a real disaster to ignore all they current work

Looking forward to more crashing browsers

Looking forward to more crashing browsers and garbled pages due to the new stuff. There's a LOT that can be done with standard HTML, even if it is tedious to do so, without turning it from something elegant into a whopper of a monster.

Advantages?

I'm not a web designer. I do know, however, the difference between HTML and XHTML (Wikipedia can be so incredibly useful [wikipedia.org]), but I don't quite understand the advantages of XHTML over HTML. Wikipedia notes this:

Whereas HTML is an application of SGML, a very flexible markup language, XHTML is an application of XML, a more restrictive subset of SGML. Because they need to be well-formed (syntactically correct), XHTML documents allow for automated processing to be performed using a standard XML library--unlike HTML, which requires a relatively complex, lenient, and generally custom parser (though an SGML parser library could possibly be used).

To laymen like me, this sounds rather cryptic. Could any of you web gurus please elaborate, and/or list other advantages of XHTML?

Re:Advantages?

But that same facet makes it very tough to write by hand. What I mean is that with HTML you've got all your tags [...]

Funny, I always thought the hard part of writing XHTML wasn't actually closing my tags, but figuring out how to separate content and style enough to keep Berners-Lee happy, have it be easy to drop in new and totally different styles down the road, have it actually look good, but still keep my sanity.

The problem with XHTML...

The problem with XHTML is that if your code isn't absolutely perfect, the parser dies with (usually) unhelpful error messages.

This "feature" makes it unsuitable for sites that allow users to add content.

Re:The problem with XHTML...

[The requirement that the entire document be well-formed] makes it unsuitable for sites that allow users to add content.

Then make sure that the content added by the user is well-formed before adding it to the site.

I don't get this at all

Why are webmasters who are currently ignoring XHTML going to be any more interested in Yet Another Dialect of HTML? At least XHTML has some advantages (like being a well-defined standard, being well-formed XML, and therefore being able to use it with XML technologies such as XSLT). It's not as if W3C provides the tools used by the non-conforming webmaster or anything. As long as there are significant numbers of sites that use bad HTML, and tools that produce more bad HTML, browsers will continue to parse bad HTML, and the pressure for people who don't care about standards to follow standards will remain slight. Come to think of it, even XSLT provides "un-XMLing" features when in HTML mode. If W3C announced a deal with Microsoft and Adobe to phase out bad HTML "features" from their website creation tools, there might be a chance of changing something...

Coalition of the Working

The W3C should release updated "HTML" specs only with both reference code for parsing, any state-setting, and any rendering, and validator with UI to test HTML for compliance.

UA makers should be able to submit to the W3C new proposed specs with both reference code and validator.

HTML versions should be date/timestamped, and validated between UA and server.

That kind of open, but moderated and encapsulated process will help ensure new specs are not only workable, but distributed to all UA makers (and programmers targeting them) uniformly. UA makers can produce their own code, as long as their HTML validates and the state/rendering results are consistent with the reference results.

A faster, more open, more comprehensive process. More uniform upgrades, more compliant/working websites, less programmers targeting specific browsers "because they work".

HTML vs XHTML

HTML at the moment is solid, robust, and gets the job done. As it has evolved it has gained additional features and power at each step, including CSS integration, better javascripting, DHTML, etc, thus leading at every step to a better end-user experience.

XHTML for all practical purposes, is HTML but with more errors. With XHTML, you get the power of being told that you have to put an end tag on all
  tags. And, umm, not a lot else. The benefits of switching to XHTML are mostly theoretical.

The W3C needs to break the focus on validation, and get back to trying to work with developers and users to get what THEY want into specifications. It sounds like they realized that XHTML will not overtake HTML any time soon, and that they need to provide some sort of reason or reasons to make that change.

becasue we dont care

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.

Evolved?

Not in the mid-west; God designed their HTML.

MS

I am sure Microsoft have their own view on this, so bollocks to standards.

evolution of languages has to be gentle

Any change of language is risky. They often go bad because language architects are not the same people than developers, the writers, the authors or the educators who actually create stuff with it. Whether for programming languages, web languages or spoken languages: developers, authors, educators, readers and users suffer, if things go too fast.

• programming language writers love the process of creating something so much that they don't care about the consequences. Example: Pascal. It was a wonderful language. It worked well. It was easy to use also with low level stuff. Wirth developed Modula, then Oberon. These were so radical changes that Pascal was killed.
• Small changes can be devastating. Example: why does XHTML backslashes in hr or br tags. These are completely unnecessary requirements. XHML did not take off because who would want to wade through thousands of pages in HTML written during the last decade and make those changes?
• Too hasty evolution can be a disaster: Example: I'm convinced that it was the accelerated evolution of Java which essentially killed it as a valuable tool for the web. What language architects often are note aware of are the existing resources, books, libraries. In the case of Java, applets written only a few years ago suddenly would no more compile because of depreciated language. Suppose a educator created a Java applet 8 years ago. She has long moved on to other projects. The language changes. The tool is lost. We can see that in many examples, where Java applets work different on different browsers and operating systems. In the case of Java for the web, Flash has taken over. Now Adobe might make the same error again, and evolve it too fast. Sorry: a flash 13 plugin needed.
• The German language reform is an other example of intellectual arrogance. It produced a lot of controversy [raecht-schreibung.de]. Language architects have to take into account the huge library of existing books, textbooks etc, which become obsolete or awkward after a change of language.

Evolution of languages is nothing bad. But it has to happen so gently that one can adapt and in such a way that old things are still readable and that porting of most existing material to the new level can be realized in time.

Re:evolution of languages has to be gentle

Small changes can be devastating. Example: why does XHTML backslashes in hr or br tags. These are completely unnecessary requirements.

Those aren't backslashes \, they are forward slashes /. And they're required because XHTML is a standards-compliant XML binding, and all valid XML documents must be well-formed. Well-formedness includes the requirement that all elements be closed. The <tag/> syntax is just shorthand for <tag></tag>.

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.

XHML did not take off because who would want to wade through thousands of pages in HTML written during the last decade and make those changes?

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 [about.com].

The real problems with XHTML are:

1. It makes some common idioms, notably including embedded Javascript code, much more awkward to write correctly.
2. 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?

HTML 4.01 is good enough

I use HTML 4.01 Transitional in my pages. Why? I am the only developer, so i develop my pages semantically and leave the layout to CSS.

So why not use strict? It is illegal in strict to have a target attribute in anchors, for example. No iframes (if used wisely, they can be intuitive)

XHTML doesn't give me enough reasons to migrate, although i did use it for my old thesis project.

Mod parent up --- lack of iframe blocks Strict use

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.

Wrong way around

People use HTML (not always in the way it is supposed to be used of course..), and people generally don't use xhtml

There are 2 ways to deal with this if this isn't what you want..

1. Make HTML even more crappy and hope people stop using it (they will, in favor of the older less crappy version of course)
2. Make using XHTML easier and more attractive.

I don't see how you accomplish 2. by changing HTML

Erm...

This may seem like a stupid question, but how else did we go from HTML 1.0 to 4.01 without the standard being 'incrementally evolved'?

Think before choosing XHTML ...

One of the best texts I've read on this subject can be found here... http://www.hixie.ch/advocacy/xhtml [hixie.ch]

Very Simple

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.

Improvements to the validator sound good

I'm looking forward to improvements to the validators. Especially a better differentiation between different types of errors.

When troubleshooting old web pages, it is quite annoying to have to wade through hundreds of 'required attribute "ALT" not specified.' or 'there is no attribute "HEIGHT".' to find the real cause of problems, like 'document type does not allow element "TABLE" here; missing one of "TH", "TD" start-tag.'.

Also, when trying to explain to clients why their old web site is crap and needs to be redesigned before it becomes practical to do small changes, a link to the validator page could be useful. We could say something like "see, it is full of bugs; we need to repair the chassis before we can start the paint job". But for that, I would rather show a link to a page with 10 bad structural errors, than to a page with 200 'required attribute "ALT" not specified.' which will not be taken seriously.

Incrementally evolved eh?

I've always thought of HTML as Extrementally Involved.

HTML is dead, but no one noticed

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:

• Browsers and WYSIWYGs allow incredibly sloppy markup
• Therefore, developers don't see any need to move up

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.

Boo to depreciation

I think it's great that these guys are trying to improve an already existing standard.

What? They want to take elements away from us? Who the fuck do they think they are, I'm not going to change all the code on my webpage just because they say, "Oh, using <b> is so 1997, we're all using CSS now."

In short, they can pry my <s> tag out of my cold dead hands.

Another incremental standard the world will ignore

So, wait. Webmasters are ignoring XHTML, so they're going to roll out yet another dialect of HTML that forgoes the advantages of XHTML, but slowly becomes XHTML-like, and expect everyone to suddenly flock to it?

Sure, as a webmaster, I can follow XHTML rules for any new page or script I write - for someone who already writes correct HTML, the nuances are not substantial. Tell a webmaster about the existence of the </p> tag and you're a third of the way there. But do they really expect I'm going to go back and rewrite all those pages I wrote back in '99? Where does the W3C get off remotely invalidating [cexx.org] something that was correct when people wrote it, and expecting them to "fix" it? As long as browsers will correctly render old HTML, old HTML will persist.

Not a matter of standards...

I don't think this is much a matter of wanting to conform to standards, as it is that the majority of web pages out there were probably built before XHTML became popular.

I think most professionals are probably coding in XHTML, whether by hand or by GUI program.

This is going to be one of those slow-adopting things just like everything else because you don't want stuff to break. Look how long it took us to get rid of the PS2-style mouse/keyboard ports on our computers, even though USB has been around for ages now.

Let the search engines motivate...

I have an idea. Since XHTML is XML and can be parsed as such (as stated in another post referencing WIKI) why not have the 'important' search engines out there give kudos points to those that use higher DTDs? I am imagining that if a document is valid XHTML, it can be indexed (XPath?, etc) easier and therefore processed with fewer 1s and 0s and with less ambiguity then HTML.

W3C produces mostly garbage

I'm pretty unimpressed with what's been coming out of the W3C over the last few years; yes, they cleaned up the specs a little, but they produced a disproportionate amount of junk in the same time and I think most of their new standards have been flops.

I think the problem is that the W3C is trying to invent new stuff rather than standardizing existing practice after the market has decided on something. Unfortunately, that kind of approach not only risks going wrong, it attracts entirely the wrong kind of people to an organization like that.

Internet Explorer?

The W3C believe that their efforts with XHTML are going unnoticed or unused by many websites out there.

I've noticed that MSIE tends to render (valid) XHTML by just displaying the raw XML. I'd imagine that that's quite a barrier to adoption. Removing the DOCTYPE and avoiding CDATA sections seems to help, presumably because Explorer just assumes it's HTML in that case. But then it doesn't validate, of course. Also, what extension should be used for local files (e.g. documentation) if Windows users must be able to double-click the files to read them?

Its about CONTENT

All the hand wringing... really!

As long as there are window dresser's and make-up artists we'll continue to see XHTML-type evolutions. Missing are the journalists, librarians, ethnographers, anthropologists, etc... who could actually massage *content* into higher order contexts rather than reaching for new formats, colors, bells and whistles.

HTML 4.01 Strict

Does a good enough job for me, is accepted by all the major browsers, is an accepted standard, keeps content and style separate, and doesn't require as big a change from HTML transitional (tag soup) as there is going to XHTML. Not to mention that IE still doesn't handle XHTML properly, and as far as I'm, concerned, there just aren't enough reasons to change to XHTML.

To all you people using XHTML out there...

You're probably not as smart as you think.

Every day I see websites, blogs, wikis, forums, and other such software all claiming "XHTML compliance". And sure, for the most part, many of them are well formed and run throught the w3 parser just fine.

HOWEVER, the vast majority of them are _not_ compliant!

Why is this? While the _markup_ is fine, the content is not being sent with the correct _mime type_, invalidating the document before parsing can even begin.

You see, the vast majority of XHTML documents are sent with the text/html header. Think of the mime type as being like an envelope that the document is sent inside.* The browser, when it gets the envelope, decides what parser it is going to use to process the contents inside. And it sees text/html, and sends it straight off to the tag soup parser, the _HTML_ parser, NOT the XHTML one.

The relevant standards [w3.org] show that unless you are serving "HTML compatible" XHTML (this is XHTML 1.0 transitional), you are in violation of the standards by serving XHTML as text/html. And since everyone's favourite web browser, IE6 (and 7), do not support proper XHTML mime types, you're stuck with at most XHTML 1.0 transitional.

And then, given the problems outlined [hixie.ch] with serving XHTML as HTML anyway, you may as well just use HTML 4 strict or transitional (if you want iframes).

So what does this have to do with this issue? Well, sure the vast majority of websites on the 'net do not use XHTML. But maybe that's partly because the user agent space simply isn't ready for it. Fix the user agents, then the supposed XHTML software out there can become compliant, and from there you may see more people make the transition.

Note: I'm not in any way defending _all_ of the websites out there that don't use XHTML. Just some of them :)

* With apologies to Martyn Smith, whom I borrowed the analogy from :)

Lethargy.com

Jesus, how hard is it to change from HTML to XHTML? Learn CSS (no hard task), get rid of stuff like frames and tables, and HTML Tidy.

Curse of legacy

I love all the new features and functionality that have been coming to us incrementally over the years - css, xml, xhtml, etc - to make life easier and more organized for a web developer. But the most frustrating part is that there will always be a huge base of software/systems only using the 'old' way of doing things. The only way I've been able to cope without losing my sanity is through 'progressive enhancement' techniques. The basic idea is that a web site starts out with the base level and builds up on that in a completely user transparent way. One example is with javascript on/off. Start by displaying a JS neutral site and then have a non-JS browser invisible tag that 'turns on' JS features and 'turns off' the non-JS components of a page. Perhaps these techniques can be used for future enhancements coming down from W3C

Moo

1) Make a new proposed Standard.
2) Hope everyone accepts it.
(everyone rejects it)
3) Modify current standard to force people to accept it.

What's the point of a proposed standard if they won't accept rejection?

Good low-cost cross-platform WYSIWYG editors

That's what'a missing, a decent editor for XHTML that is:
- WYSIWYG (not everyone 'gets' style tags)
- Low Cost
- Cross Platform
- and easy to use

Many people are still using the likes of Claris Home Page, PageMill, Hotdog, etc. mainly because there are no good entry level web editors in thier price range or skill set anymore.

Same thing with ODF it may be a better standard but common people need to have access to it.

Core HTML Not Broken!!! Please Don't Fix

See the handful of tags where it says "Allowed HTML" when you are posting to Slashdot? I seem to recall there being some suggestion that things like b for bold were discouraged, and that we are supposed to use stylesheets instead. NO WAY. Let me repeat that. NO WAY. Why? Because these handful of core tags are simple and easy to remember. If you start forcing people to use complicated stuff, we are just going to end up with more abominations like WikiText and WBBScript, which just re-invent the simple tags that HTML already has. Yuck. Please don't do that.

OTOH, if they are not talking about taking away my simple little tags, then sorry for the rant.

The whole idea of HTML is severely flawed.

What the world needs is a programming language platform that:

1. is lazily distributed.
2. treats code and data and data as code.
3. has a standard Application Programming Interface, Application Binary Interface.
4. has a standard Remote Invocation Interface which is transparent and orthogonal to the language.
5. has security right from the start.

HTML then could simply be a hypertext sub-language of this language, and there would be no problem to extend it in arbitrary new ways.

Bah!

This will mean at least one more "background color" parameter with a different spelling and syntax. Probably will depend upon its location within the HTML page.

The HTML language is a gawdawful language for doing anything. And to top it off, it's been modified, added to, plugged into, and garbaged up relentlessly by people who apparently have no concept of what a language really needs to display web pages.

I'll wait for the whole Internet structure to be torn down and replaced with something logical and therefore easy to use and program.

Anthem?

I reminded of Ayn Rand's "Anthem". This is sounds sooo similar to the difficulty of the story's postulate that the society had difficulty upgrading from torches to candles due to the approval process.

A little late, but...

I'm a little late in replying, but, I'm still going to :)

First off, I do not believe (X)HTML is still the way to go for web. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a Flash advocate (*eek*) but it's simply horrible to do anything useful. I'd personally like to see a more 'software-development' approach to these things, but hey, that's me.

Anyway, IMHO, very bad and very good comments have been made for both HTML and XHTML. Yes, HTML 4.01 will get the job done in many cases, and no, XHTML isn't properly supported in the most-used browser: IE. What strikes me as odd as that it's seen as so either/or.

You can implement most XHTML things perfectly in HTML (as in, browsers will display it properly) and it does, very much, improve readability and maintainability. What makes me scream "wtf?!?!!" the most is people who disagree with that. Using lowercase tags, using " to encase attributes (and doing attributes the XHTML way), closing all tags, strict doctype, etc. It's just so much easier in the end, get used to it and you will not want to go back! All popular browsers will accept HTML formed like this perfectly. Since I switched to this (ofcourse including all the CSS and such, though CSS is still lacking in so many ways), development has actually gotten a lot easier, and my pages have the added bonus of being perfectly parseable by any XML parser. So no, it's not 100% HTML, it's not 100% XHTML, but it's nearly XHTML and looks good in HTML, cross-browser and all.
In the end though, it's still not 'how the web should be'.

Re:WHY XHTML are going unnoticed ?

As it is, html serves its purpose. Neither the visitors nor developers need more from html.

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 [amazon.com] 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 [bbc.co.uk] on how hard it is for blind users to use most plain HTML websites.

Re:WHY XHTML are going unnoticed ?

If your web site is part of a federal contract, it has to be compliant.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_508 [wikipedia.org]

Re:WHY XHTML are going unnoticed ?

The answer is - we DONT need it.

Honestly, I don't see the need for anything beyond HTML 3.2. All this new crap does is get in the way.

Re:WHY XHTML are going unnoticed ?

As a developer you soon notice that treating html as xml is an easy way to make generation easier and with less bugs.

Re:WHY XHTML are going unnoticed ?

xhtml 1.0 doesn't need the xml mimetype, only 1.1 does. The IE7 team's rationale is that they don't want to support the mime type until the xml renderer is capable of processing xhtml properly. Just "accepting" the xml mimetype and then using the html engine is cludgy, and I agree with him. But yeah: IE7 doesn't support xhtml 1.1. This is still planned for later (IE8?)

What a stupid comment

he only ones who are excited are likely the adslingers, looking for a new way to slide, pop, fade, or otherwise "extense" advertising windows at us.

What difference does it make if an ad is served using well formed markup?

Being forced to use well formed markup has the potential to stop some of the more scummy tricks advertisers use. It also forces them to employ people who understand document structure and these people would generally be opposed to obnoxious ads.

This is a response to the WHATWG and Hoehrmann

I believe that this is a response to the actions of the WHATWG (Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group) [whatwg.org] (X)HTML 5 [whatwg.org] and to Bjoern Hoehrmann leaving the W3C QA [w3.org].

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.

Re:WHY XHTML are going unnoticed ?

we - 'not you', 'us' the other 'we'. there are numerous ways of pulling content and putting it online in an interactive manner.

Re:WHY XHTML are going unnoticed ?

"We" need xhtml, "we" pull web pages into XML parse trees all the time as part of our jobs.

Exactly. It makes life simpler when HTML is actually XHTML as we can use common, standard APIs and parsers and
get predictable, deterministic results. Accepting kludgey, broken, badly formed HTML and trying to parse it
is a much worse proposition than getting well formed XML.

Re:WHY XHTML are going unnoticed ?

As it is, html serves its purpose

That's a ridiculously short-sighted assertion along the lines of: "The world only needs five computers" and "nobody will ever need more than 640 K of RAM." The Web is the most important application development platform in the history of computing and HTML still lacks some form and navigation widgets that were common on graphical platforms 15 years ago. These limitations mean that sites are full of accessibility and security-destroying Javscript.

Re:WHY XHTML are going unnoticed ?

I take it you are not a programmer? Have you ever tried to parse a website for content? With HTML you are stuck with REGEX or some such hack, xml is simple, you run it through an xml parser and bam, you have a complete DOM tree.

Re:WHY XHTML are going unnoticed ?

Exactly. Assembly works, why bother with so called "high level" languages?

Re:WHY XHTML are going unnoticed ?

It is a problem with such groups like w3c that they have a baseless belief that even something that people are satisfied with needs tampering with.

My opinion is also that is their quest to "evolve" their standards, the W3C is starting to become an obstacle for their adoption. It is evident that it is impossible to make something a true standard (adopted by the wide majority), when you make it a moving target at the same time. So the W3C should concentrate on making higher quality standards, rather than releasing poor standards often (like they do now!). "Release early, release often!" is good practice for (open source) developers, not for standard bodies!

Re:Kansas will ban this

If God created the mess that is the world in six days, He should need a lot more time to create the mess that is HTML.

Re:WHY XHTML are going unnoticed ?

The problem with "What you see is what you get" (html) "is What you see is all you've got" -- Dennis Ritchie

IMOSHO, html evolving into xhtml is the way to go. html doesn't do everything we need and xhtml/xml is too big a step for most people/websites/browsers to make.

Re:WHY XHTML are going unnoticed ?

1. XHTML seems to reduce developer chioce rather than 'extend' it
2. disabled wise forget about xhtml.
3. 'new' ie hopefully wont crash with xhtml
4. ? still css issues with ie

I will deepen these points below.

The bbc article (quoted in comments) is rather dubious as xhtml reduces attributes like say description, it would appear the xhtml and section 508 is an 'either or' construct hence why people use 4.01 rather than validated xhtml.

As to 'flash' (see bbc) being the answer blurgh

Problem one: is not not insurmountable, you essentially throw away any old html code, and rethink and then recode the xhtml way since old html is 'bad/evil/something else'.

Problem two: Read the bsi document pas 78, a uk version of 508 - its damn funny these guys could not manage a party in brewery

Problem 3: while new ie might not crash when presented with a page of xhtml, its older sibings dont like it. I suggest the w3c and microsoft part company on any issue.

Meebo (im gateway, one of many im gateways of recent) where using html 4.01 and not xhtml standard - if the minds of meebo (a startup) find xhtml a waste of time?

What does that say about ie and microsoft's involvement in the w3c.

HTML sucks

HTML neither provides logical structure to information nor provides a nice way to create rich applications. It was originally made to put near plain-text with hyperlinks online and that is pretty much all it's good for. It was a minor improvement over Gopher. Switching to XHTML + CSS does help a lot but it still is a pretty crappy solution. I'd rather they create a new format for the web, without all the pointless hold overs, that makes it easy to keep information, layout, and function as discrete components that can easily be modified or alternated individually. HTML was good because it was simple and just worked which is what you need to get a technology going but eventually you have to make something that works well if you want a concept to keep growing.