Re: Choosing name for XML serialization (Was: Re: HTML5 differences from HTML4 editor's draft (XHTML5 and XHTML2))

On Mon, 2007-06-25 at 14:05 -0400, Maurice Carey wrote:
[...]
> I'm lost.
> 
> If html5 is the official contination of html4.x and xhtml is an xml version
> of html4 and html5 will have an xml verion...why is there still a completely
> separate XHTML2?

Good question. I don't think you're lost at all.

The W3C process for chartering these two working groups was very
messy, but it seems that it didn't confuse you. ;-)
The proposal review didn't result in a consensus in any
one particular direction, so we chartered two groups with
somewhat overlapping scopes. Our attempt to summarize the advice
from W3C membership is cited from the charter/history section of
the WG homepage
  http://www.w3.org/html/wg/#charter_history 
->
 Architectural vision behind the HTML/XHTML2/Forms Chartering
 http://www.w3.org/2007/03/vision.html

Justification for XHTML2 is stuff like...

"Meanwhile, enterprise-strength needs are met by XHTML2..."

Bob DuCharme's recent article includes similar themes...
Put XHTML 2 to work now
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/x-xhtml2now.html

There we find "I used it to write this article, with Emacs in nXML mode
(see Resources) to drive context-sensitive XML editing off of XHTML 2's
RELAX NG schema. Before I turned the article in, I converted it to
conform to the developerWorks DTD with a simple XSLT stylesheet."

So he wrote the article using XHTML2, and then it was converted
to a developerworks DTD, and then it was converted to... let's
see... XHTML 1.0 transitional for delivery to the web. I
suppose there's a time and a place for pre-publication batch
processing like this, but I'd be more impressed if I could
view source on the article and see the cool new XHTML 2 markup
right there.

Likewise, I watched an interview...

interview with Steven Pemberton (CWI W3C) and Michael Smith (W3C) at
Xtech 2007 

http://blip.tv/file/241108

Michael Smith says that most mobile content is written in one language
and shipped over the wire in another. Where's the view source effect?

I'm much more interested in a standard for the content
that actually goes over the wire, and I think the fact
that the HTML that goes over the wire is often the
very same HTML that the author dealt with directly
(either as raw markup or at least as concepts in
a direct-manipulation editing tool) is a huge win.

Look at Java vs JavaScript. JavaScript is typically
sent over the wire in source form; Java is sent
in compiled form. The result is that JavaScript
spreads virally while Java spreads more or less
like a typical programming language (with a big
marketing budget ;-).

> Aren't all the major browsers members of this working group and pushed for
> html5 to be the official new version? Won't that mean there'll likely not be
> anyone implementing xhtml2 when/if they ever finish writing their specs?

I wouldn't go so far as to say noone will implement XHTML 2;
the Web is a pretty big place.  The benefits of single-source
authoring are clear enough; I suppose the world can use one or two
more formats sorta like DocBook... but should we call them (X)HTML?
The name XHTML2 suggests it's an HTML specification which
puts it in direct competition with HTML 5. And no, I don't think
it is likely to succeed in that market position.


-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/

Received on Monday, 25 June 2007 20:39:50 UTC