Re: XHTML 2.0 and Semantics

On Mon, 2003-01-13 at 15:40, Alex Rousskov wrote:
> Indeed, W3C is having a hard time delivering on its promise of a
> "future proof" markup

I think they are doing just fine.  All the existing documents that have
been marked up semantically can be easily/automatically translated to
newer standards (either by rewriting the document itself, or within the
user agent).  With documents using non-semantic markup, font tags, etc,
it would be vastly more difficult to understand the meaning of these in
terms of "new" semantics.  I think perhaps what we need are more readily
available tools for upgrading documents to newer standards, perhaps even
as part of the working groups deliverables along with the specification.
And as far as the "future" is concerned... I think the web as we know it
today is just the tip of the iceberg.  I think the decisions we make
today are going to be increasingly difficult to change in the future, as
these standards become vastly even more entrenched than they are
already.  I am more concerned with the longer term outlook, even say 25
to 50 years down the road.  Nobody is forcing you to upgrade to XHTML
2!  I am, for one, pleased to see a fresh start using all that we have
learned.  In the long term I think we will have a cleaner and more rich
base of documents to work with, and will look back and be glad we made
the transition now.

-- 
Chris Hubick
mailto:chris@hubick.com
http://www.hubick.com/

Received on Monday, 13 January 2003 17:54:32 UTC