Re: XHTML 2.0 User Agent Conformance

"David Woolley" <david@djwhome.demon.co.uk> wrote in message
news:200311010934.hA19YfV05991@djwhome.demon.co.uk...
>
> > What are the central goals behind the development of XHTML 2?  How is
>
> I believe the key goal is the creation of a tool for the "semantic
> web".

Do you have a reference where the WG actually say this, I requested it from
the editor some weeks ago, and have yet to recieve an answer on what XHTML
2.0 is trying to achieve (and I can't see how we can review the document
without such knowledge)

> 1) As an advertising copy language (for which I think a page description
>   language would better fit the designers' wants as they typically want
>   total control) - such pages often have little informatiion content;

So SVG would seem to be the appropriate W3 technology, mixed with parts of
XHTML 1.0/1.1 to provide tables and lists.  XHTML 2.0 should not (and as you
say appears not to) be attempting to solve the problem of needing
presentation, SVG exists and succeeds in the space.

> 2) As a language for writing thin client data entry and database
>   applications (when sold as third party products, or used on the public
>   internet, these often have a significant element of item (1));

Again, SVG 1.2 + XForms seems to fulfil this use case.

> Item (3) tends not to be strongly obvious on the public internet,
> because real knowledge is valuable intellectual property[A], but there
> are some organisations that are heavy users of such documentation.

XHTML as described seems to weak to express the rich Semantics users need -
certainly it's not expressive enough for any of my needs.  I solve this
problem with RDF, and a presentation language with appropriate ways of
linking to RDF seems to be a more appropriate approach trying to solve both
the user understandability and machine understandability in one.

This doesn't mean I'm suggesting serving RDF to all consumers is useful -
but a method to include RDF, and a mechanism allowing for RDF to describe
the elements is almost certainly more useful than just trying to capture it
in the few elements in XHTML.

I don't know the motivation for XHTML 2.0, I'd like to see that, I'd also
like to see the HTML WG address the outstanding issues with XHTML 1.0 and
1.1 with higher priority than working on XHTML 2.0 - they're a lot more of a
problem in the world today.

Jim.

Received on Saturday, 1 November 2003 07:30:51 UTC