- From: Dan Connolly <connolly@w3.org>
- Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2007 15:39:45 -0500
- To: Maurice Carey <maurice@thymeonline.com>
- Cc: HTML Working Group <public-html@w3.org>
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