Daniel’s Blog

I am going to try my best not to laugh at HTML5, I read a little while ago that someone was going to create HTML5 as a “representation of the type of code that is currently on the web” (sorry can’t find the site where I read that from - so no reference, you are just going to have to trust me on that approximate quote). And so now there is an HTML Working Draft on the W3C website: Available here (http://www.w3.org/html/wg/html5/).

Near the beginning of the document (a section called relationship) they say:

[XHTML2] lacks elements to express the semantics of many of the non-document types of content often seen on the Web. For instance, forum sites, auction sites, search engines, online shops, and the like, do not fit the document metaphor well, and are not covered by XHTML2.

Which I refuse to believe as XHTML 2 is made to be able to handle “modules”, and it is based on XML and therefore can be extended… not to mention being able to handle RDFa and microformats.

The next thing I would like to quote from the Working Draft is:

The second concrete syntax uses XML, and is known as “XHTML5″. When a document is transmitted with an XML MIME type, such as application/xhtml+xml, then it is processed by an XML processor by Web browsers, and treated as an “XHTML5″ document. Generally speaking, authors are discouraged from trying to use XML on the Web, because XML has much stricter syntax rules than the “HTML5″ variant described above, and is relatively newer and therefore less mature.

• First thing: XHTML5 is invented in the same draft, and in the same paragraph it says XHTML5 shouldn’t be used.
• Second thing: ok what about XHTML 3 and 4… I think I missed them
• Third thing: It is a good thing that XMLs structure is strict, it means that it can be handled with some good tools such as XPath and XSLT.
• Fourth thing: SGML became a W3C activity in 1995 (but was created in the 80s). XML became a project in 1996 and 1997, and it was based on SGML. In my eyes there is a natural progression: IBMs GML -> SGML -> XML… just like HTML -> XHTML

Some of the things they put in the document are so strange, especially as one of the authors is from Google and the other is from the Safari/WebKit team at Apple! I thought both of these teams would prefer the ease of handling an XML based solution, especially when it comes to search engines (come on Google, you should know better).

The XHTML2 document seems to be backed by a lot more people than the HTML5 working draft, and I hope that it stays that way. However, saying that, I would accept HTML5 if it did actually become standard (in its XML form anyway).

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