Re: XHTML 2.0 considered harmful

Daniel Glazman wrote:
> (d) sorry to say, but XHTML 2.0 seems to me the live proof that
> something is going wrong at W3C. I feel that this spec represents a
> solution maximizing the gap between authors' needs and industrial
> standardization compromise.

As someone who writes web services for a living, XHTML 2.0 is everything 
I ever wanted. In fact, if the WG hadn't released a draft of XHTML 2.0 
yet, I would probably have given up on web sites and gone back to just 
writing programs.

<h1> to <h6> is a nightmare for someone who wants to insert 
pre-generated sections of text, since you need to make sure the <hX> 
matches. <section> and <h> solves that problem.

The <img> tag is horrible -- you can't add rich alternative text, and 
what's the alternative text doing in an attribute anyway? <object> 
solves that problem beautifully.

I hate working with forms in current versions of [X]HTML. When I need to 
change the text on a button, I need to dive into the form markup itself, 
potentially messing something up if I'm not careful. XForms on the other 
hand separates the form data itself from the text I want around to be 
around it, allowing me to write the forms once and never touch them again.

<br> is just plain ugly. <line> über alles.

The style attribute? What do you need it for? Oh, the site management 
system you're using doesn't allow you to change the contents of <head>? 
I see. And it never occured to you that that might be a problem with 
your system and not the markup language?

All we need now is to remove the <a> tag, and we're done.

> Again, I just cannot believe the HTML Writers Guild was part of the
> process that released XHTML 2.0 WD.

And I cannot believe that the HTML Writers Guild, http://www.hwg.org/, 
are still using <table> for layout.

/Jonas

Received on Tuesday, 14 January 2003 06:59:17 UTC