XHTML is no longer being maintained

Hi!

According to modern editions of the HTML Living Standard (https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/xhtml.html):

> the XML syntax is essentially unmaintained — in that, it’s not expected that any further features will ever be added to the XML syntax (even when such features have been added to the HTML syntax).

(Where 'the XML syntax' is XHTML.)

This seems worrying! One of the great advances of modern EPUB over the format's earlier versions was unpinning the versions of its core media types, allowing use of—among other things—arbitrarily-modern HTML in our XHTML content documents (within the limits of what readers will realistically be able to handle); but now here we are getting stuck on the path to outdatedness anyway, for our XHTML content documents, on the basis that they no longer will be modern HTML.

(Indeed, I've already personally run afoul of a case where this is relevant: XHTML, unlike modern HTML, lacks support for Declarative Shadow DOM, which I'd been hoping I might be able to make use of in a currently-ongoing EPUB-related project of mine.)

I don't know what, if anything, it would make sense to do about this. The ideal, of course, would be to magically produce some new maintainers for HTML's XML syntax so it can be returned to consistent up-to-date-ness with non-X HTML; but that seems likely to be difficult, potentially to the point of logistical infeasibility, and no other possible solutions have yet occurred to me which seem any more feasible than that one. (Likely-less-feasibly, of course, there's some temptation towards allowing use of non-XML-syntax HTML within EPUB; but that seems, from my admittedly-limited knowledge, likely to be an impractical path to go down which would inflict large amounts of difficulty on developers of reader software.)

Still, even absent immediate knowledge of a solution, it seems like a concern worth raising to the group's attention, and (as far as I can tell from skimming the group archives) not one which has already been raised by anyone else. So here it is. Does this appear to be a real problem to others here as it does to me? And, if so, are there any potential solutions I've missed which are apparent to others here and worth pursuing in more depth?

Thanks,
Alyssa Riceman

Received on Friday, 2 August 2024 19:13:38 UTC