[TxMt] HTML Changes

[Allan Odgaard]

On 30. Oct 2006, at 19:12, Fred B wrote:

> On 10/12/06, Allan Odgaard <throw-away-1 at macromates.com> wrote:
>> Though let me just remind anyone planning on writing XHTML pages
>> to (re-)read  http://www.hixie.ch/advocacy/xhtml
> Then read "Sending XHTML as text/html Considered Harmful to  
> Feelings"[1]

Which boils down to: “but it works for me” :p

An interesting recent development: [Reinventing HTML][1] from [Tim  
Berners-Lee][2], the inventor of the World Wide Web:

   > Some things are clearer with hindsight of several years. It is  
necessary to evolve
   > HTML incrementally. The attempt to get the world to switch to  
XML, including quotes
   > around attribute values and slashes in empty tags and namespaces  
all at once didn't
   > work. The large HTML-generating public did not move, largely  
because the browsers
   > didn't complain

Though the reason is not that browsers didn’t complain, it was that  
they did not support the new standards, and they did not do that  
because there were no benefits and W3C was far too busy cranking out  
new standards which were just re-inventing existing stuff. I am not  
in the enterprise business or whatever business uses the W3C  
standards that go beyond HTML, DOM, and CSS, but from my POV there  
are a lot of standards created by W3C that should never have been  
created (VRML, SMIL, or even XHTML 2.0 etc.).

If we look at XML, we have XPath and XML Query to query it, we have  
XML Proc and XSL to transform it, we have XLink and XPointer to  
describe links, we have XML Scheme and the DTD to give our content  
model, we have XForms and the form tags in XHTML to take user input,  
etc. etc. I.e. in each case we actually have more than one recently  
created spec for the thing, and the spec is normally huge, and there  
is no reference implementation of it, or even an implementing -- yet  
we can easily achieve what these things do with the tools we already  
have, so no wonder the industry stopped listening to W3C ;)


[1]: http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/node/166
[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee