Web Applications 1.0 & HTML 5 »
Will it beat XHTML? I’m entirely curious.
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Posted by John Zeratsky at 10:09am on 3/28/2007
I certainly drank the kool-aid. All of my future markup will be as HTML5-compatible as possible.
(I like XHTML, too, but its potential was never fully realized in the real world. Time to move on.)
Posted by Nick at 12:34pm on 3/28/2007
XHTML served to raise awareness that crappy markup wasn’t a requirement for the future of the web, but it didn’t bring a tangible benefit in and of itself. I’m actually kinda excited to see HTML5 on the rise. I’ve been fighting the “XHTML isn’t a good fit for web applications” bug for almost a year now, and I’m ready to have a glass of kool-aid myself.
Goodbye XML, hello something better (oh, like HTML+JSON).
Posted by John Zeratsky at 8:33am on 3/29/2007
You’re right, XHTML did serve that purpose, but I wonder if that’s because it was a subset of XML (that’s the part that was never fully realized) or simply because it was more strictly defined (and less tolerant of presentational markup) than HTML4?
I think the question is: If HTML5 had come along instead of XHTML, would it have had the same effect? (I think yes.)
Posted by Nick at 7:04pm on 3/29/2007
I’m all in favor of HTML5 now, but I’m not sure if HTML5 would have been “right” at the time. (“The time” being four-ish years ago or so.)
I mean, XHTML is strict — and that’s both its upside and its downside. It’s great because you know exactly how to write well-formed documents — or perhaps, you know “what you did wrong before.” XHTML sucks because XML’s really a data interchange format (think of all the mime-type discussions you’ve seen, yikes!) and who really wants to craft pretty data interchange formats?
I have a hunch that HTML5 — which is in a way a kinder, gentler XHTML — would have lacked the backbone to really clean up the web the way the super-strictness of XHTML did.
Really, it was all “XHTML+CSS” as a pair back in the day. I’m not sure if CSS would have been able to take the way it has without the strictness of XHTML. And we’d definitely have to say DHTML2 instead of AJAX. :)
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