Bring on XHTML 2

You missed the bit where it says “# Being able to point to real-world benefits is important”

Have a look at the XHTML 2.0 design aims (http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/introduction.html#aims) and the list of major differences with XHTML 1.0 (http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/introduction.html#s_intro_differences).

Adrian: In an attempt to identify “real world benefits”, you supply aims and differences. In one brief comment you have managed to sum up exactly what has gone wrong with the W3C.

I’m just thankful I now use Macs and that a lot of people are getting smart and turning to Firefox etc. That said, there are a large raft of people who never upgrade anything who need to kind of be catered for. In the past months I’ve come across magazein publishers still using IE5 on OS9, IE5 on win 95 with the lowest screen resolution I’ve seen in a long time. SO what do we do? Leave them behind? Hard to say really.

Failure-on-error is explicit in the XML specification, but we are still in the painful transition from HTML to XML. Barring any sort of vendor petulance or an unforeseeable paradigm shift, I’m confident that we’ll eventually get exactly what you’re asking for.

I wish I was this confident! :-) For the same legacy reasons that IE won’t render a page correctly even if you specify the strict doctype, I can’t ever see MS not displaying an xhtml web document just because of a badly nested tag. Note: I’m also not sure if I would want this, since it dramatically increases the barrier to publishing content for non-technical people. I would guess that most web pages are probably written by non-technical hobbyists. I guess this should depend on the doctype specified. But strict, should be that: strict!

So if your mark up is valid, then I would like to know that it will be displayed in a similar fashion on all browsers. Note, I don’t mean pixel perfect, since users on different platforms expect to see certain things in certain ways (eg form controls), but the layout shouldn’t be all over the place in one browser and not the other. This is why I feel a standard rendering engine would be ideal – even though it will never happen I guess.

Given the status of Dublin Core amonst the cognoscenti, it occurred to me to visit their site, and they happen to list quite a few standards bodies that might have at least a passing interest in standardizing Trackback.

For certain values of "content," I agree that Trackbacks are contentless. However, they strengthen the Web at its most basic level by illustrating links between sites – for example I specified a Trackback to Anil’s entry, confident that some of his readers might well want to read what I posted (and what people are saying in the comments) here. The thing is, Trackback is the only popular platform that gives a publisher much control at all over the task of pushing notification of the resources to which he is linking…

As for enforceability, the fact remains that a standard is ultimately an agreement, an understanding, and no more. We miss out because the benefits of compliance devolve only to operators who can accomplish it; there’s presently no mechanism for extending that benefit to the end user on a level they’ll appreciate (at least, in this era of ubiquitous high-speed connections).

Failure-on-error is explicit in the XML specification, but we are still in the painful transition from HTML to XML. Barring any sort of vendor petulance or an unforeseeable paradigm shift, I’m confident that we’ll eventually get exactly what you’re asking for.

…And finally, the W3C never went beyond the reference implementation stage because there are too many variables. I would not envy the poor s.o.b. who was called upon to maintain codebases for that many combinations of platform and operating system… and that’s before I take into account the umbrage of programmers who would resent being pressured into working with the source code given to them by W3C…

…Just sayin’.

And, I don’t think it would be hard to build a wholly-compliant rendering engine if you didn’t have to dance around legacy issues.

And, I think Firefox would/could be first to market with a compliant rendering engine. They have a relatively good track record, could reuse much of their code, and don’t have a billion-dollar revenue stream to protect.

Anyways, most trackbacks I come across seem to be pointless, just like enrty #5 above. What is the point?

With regards to XHTML2, how about concentrating on making XHTML1.1 and CSS2.1 a proper enforceable standard. Just like if you have a syntax errror in your C code, it won’t compile, then if you have badly nested tags, the page won’t rendered at all. Probably too late for XHTML1.1, but maybe for XHTML2? Please!

Or even, instead of having umpteen different browsers vendors reinventing the wheel (badly) by coding their own rendering engine, why doesn’t the W3C supply the rendering engine and let the browser vendors worry about the bells and whistles around that (like tabbing, rss etc.).

I’m not sure how IE7 is relevant here…

Holding onto ≈80% market share makes Internet Explorer pretty relevant, I’d’ think.

Of the top of my head, two benefits: 1) the ‘h’ and ‘sect’ elements. If you design modules for a CMS or large website AND you care about the structure of your pages, you should know how important this is. 2) Universal href attributes. Simple, bloat free.

I’ve never understood this abject fear of XHTML2. I think Zeldman is wrong. It’s our best chance to pull out of this mud pit.

> You missed the bit where it says “# Being able to point to real-world benefits is important”

Have a look at the XHTML 2.0 design aims (http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/introduction.html#aims) and the list of major differences with XHTML 1.0 (http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/introduction.html#s_intro_differences).

The scope of the W3C is pretty big these days, so although this might be true for some specifications, others like XSLT & XForms have a pretty clear & direct dialogue with implementers, early adopters & end users.

>It will be interesting to see if IE7 is more than emperor’s new clothes, once it ships.

I’m not sure how IE7 is relevant here: it’s fairly clear from the IE team’s blog that they’re not doing anything more than fixing a handful of the CSS 2 bugs/holes.