On 30. Oct 2006, at 19:12, Fred B wrote:
On 10/12/06, Allan Odgaard throw-away-1@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