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W3C stops work on XHTML 2


By David Rubinstein


 David Rubinstein
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July 6, 2009 —  (Page 1 of 2)
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) will let the charter of its XHTML 2 working group expire at the end of this year and direct those resources to the development of HTML 5, according to Ian Jacobs, director of communications for the organization.

“The organic growth of HTML 5 has far superseded that of XHTML 2,” Jacobs said in an interview with SD Times. XHTML was a W3C effort to take the HTML feature set for documents, such as tables, lists and headings, and enable it to be written in XML and still work in a browser, he explained. XHTML 1 was accepted as a W3C recommendation in January 2000.

At that time, though, several browser producers said that while incorporating XML had its benefits, much of the HTML content didn’t look like XML, so the original HTML work could not be abandoned. HTML had no strict syntax, so browser interoperability was addressed by producers in the form of developing their own error-handling algorithms, Jacobs said.

As for interoperability among browsers, Jacobs said, “We said, ‘Do it this way,’ and they went off to do their own thing.” In 2004, the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) was formed by individuals from browser makers Apple, Opera and Mozilla to continue work on the HTML specification. That work, Jacobs said, went on outside the W3C.

“In 2007, we said we made a mistake,” he said. “We didn’t do our job of bridging communities.”  That year, the W3C agreed to accept WHATWG’s work on HTML 5 as a starting point on the new specification, and the WHATWG work came under the auspices of the W3C.

Jacobs said there were two efforts going on at the W3C: an evolutionary path to advance HTML, and a revolutionary path that did not deal with HTML. “We decided after lots of discussion that the future is HTML 5.”

Ian Hickson, acting spokesman for the WHATWG, said he was surprised to hear the W3C announcement. “I had thought XHTML 2 was still under development and wasn’t aware that there were any plans to drop it,” he said in reply to questions regarding the W3C decision.



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Comments


07/07/2009 11:18:29 AM EST

Standardize the AJAX API? Please don't! Here's why: every big "entity" who makes an AJAX API - makes these huge slow sloth-like, overly complicated "libraries" I've only seen ONE AJAX library worth extending: http://sourceforge.net/projects/iwf/ It's lean, mean, easy to use, perfect!

United StatesJason P Sage


07/07/2009 01:20:59 PM EST

To quote myself in public, "Simple always wins, and complicated always breaks." The key to the success of HTML5 has been in asking the simple question, "What problem does this solve?" whenever someone wants to add something to the spec. The spec is not complete when you can't add any more to it. The spec is complete when you can no longer remove anything from it.

United StatesSean Utt


07/07/2009 10:42:57 PM EST

So the "future" of the web will be an another wild west of half-baked technologies? At least XHTML was deterministically parseable. That low rumbling sound must be the oncoming stampede of crappy cut & paste hackery.

United StatesMark M.


07/08/2009 06:07:29 AM EST

I have been working for many years in web dev. And the conclusion I have come to is that we should do a totally different thing design from the beginning to be a web application host. I don't believe that javascript is the right language to build large app. I know it can do everything but it does it terribly. So, I believe we need some radical changes that would actually make our lives easier. Not just more stuff staffed into the spec.

EgyptAh


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