[thelist] The Web's future: XHTML 2.0

[Peter-Paul Koch]

>Just to add my .02 here, the negative opinions posted seem a little
>reactionary. Very similar to the reactions that some developers have
>to moving to layer based design practices.

I don't quite agree.

In my opinion HTML is finished and done, it doesn't need any more changes.
It does what it's supposed to do (structure a document while applying some
basic styles like the margin between paragraphs). There is no need for
anything more. If we want whistles and bells we can use CSS and JavaScript.

Also, browser vendors cannot, now or ever, just drop old-fashioned tag-soup
HTML. If they did, many sites wouldn't work any more and the end users would
blame the browser and download a new one.

If IE11 and Mozilla 6, when they appear, are still meant for browsing the
WWW as we know it now, they *must* support tag-soup.

So browsers will continue to support HTML until the end of the WWW. This
means that web developers don't *need* to change to XHTML or whatever (they
may, of course, if they wish, but there's no requirement).

>Sure there are some things about the standard which seem like they are
>not in touch with our realities today, that doesn't mean that <br>
>is going to stop working in the future though.

Yup. So why remove it in the first place?

>The W3C needs to stay a step or two ahead of the browser developers, who
>are a step ahead of the web developers. So in reality the W3C needs to have
>a spec done before the browser developers start planning for the next
>release.

That is completely true. But since HTML doesn't need to be evolved any
further, why bother with new specs that are unusable anyway? Concentrate on
exciting new CSS stuff instead.

Web developers don't need XHTML 2.

ppk

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