XHTML, RIP
Jens O. Meiert, July 4, 2009 / August 17, 2009.
This entry is filed under Web Development.
Let’s finish off this week of morbid post titles: The XHTML 2 Working Group is expected to stop work end of 2009.
Today [July 2, 2009] the Director announces that when the XHTML 2 Working Group charter expires as scheduled at the end of 2009, the charter will not be renewed. By doing so, and by increasing resources in the HTML Working Group, W3C hopes to accelerate the progress of HTML 5 and clarify W3C’s position regarding the future of HTML.
Now while this post’s title exaggerates a bit – you know me by now –, the W3C sets a clear signal when it comes to the XHTML track of specifications that is actually not surprising:
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Effectively, and thanks to the most popular browser out there with a market share of more than 90 % in certain locales, XHTML 1.0/1.1 can still not be used at all.
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While XHTML 2.0 is exciting from an “ideal markup language” point of view – and from that perspective, I’d very much wish XHTML 2.0 to succeed –, there’s just not been enough development and momentum.
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HTML 5 will feature an XHTML serialization anyway.
The point is this: The future of the web is based on HTML 5. And technically, you can use HTML 5 already, as I wrote a year ago.
For XHTML, until user agents broadly support application/xhtml+xml and application/xml, even XHTML 5 will have a hard time, and authors will have to keep on waiting to use all the nifty features of XHTML, including both extensibility and consumer-friendly error handling.
As a side note, I don’t know why Jeffrey seems so surprised about this development. Maybe it is for design leads; for tech leads, it shouldn’t. No offense.
Also, for non-DH6 commentators, meiert.com is my only project that uses “supposed” XHTML, solely because of some WordPress refactoring pain. That means that at least for the English part of this site, the cost of solution is still higher than the cost of problem.
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Comments
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On July 5, 2009, 7:59 CEST, Gunnar Bittersmann said:
XHTML 1.0/1.1 can still not be used at all.
?? Both XHTML 1.0 and 1.1 may be served as ‘text/html’. XHTML 1.0 can be written 100% HTML 4 compatible, so there is no problem at all to use XHTML 1.0. In certain cases, this is problematic with XHTML 1.1, though.
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On July 5, 2009, 9:24 CEST, Jens Meiert said:
Gunnar, right now, neither do you want to discuss rhetorics with me nor XML. I’m pretty certain you’re smart enough to get the point.
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On July 13, 2009, 15:12 CEST, Lenen Meer said:
As you mentioned in your article, it’s just too bad XHTML 2.0 isn’t going to make it. So chapter closed and looking forward to 2010.
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On September 8, 2009, 20:21 CEST, Sebastião Ricardo said:
Hi, i’m a brazilian developer. In first, sorry if my english wasn’t wrote well.
Well, I am developing an article about “XForms” and I’m worried by the fact of knowing that the project of XHTML 2 will be discontinued. Somebody could say me if, together within XHTML 2, the XForms concept will be discontinued?
I thank everyone’s attention!
