- From: Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis <bhawkeslewis@googlemail.com>
- Date: Fri, 09 Jan 2009 12:49:31 +0000
- To: Dustin Boyd <rpgfan3233@gmail.com>
- CC: www-html@w3.org, Mark Birbeck <mark.birbeck@webbackplane.com>, Brett Patterson <inspiron.pattersonb@gmail.com>, David Woolley <forums@david-woolley.me.uk>, Molte <molte93@gmail.com>, Shavkat Karimov <shavkat@seomanager.com>
On 9/1/09 00:23, Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis wrote:
> On 8/1/09 22:47, Dustin Boyd wrote:
>> - Different multimedia formats, different programming languages and
>> even different ways to deliver a package were all designed with
>> different goals in mind, so why is it that HTML 5 and XHTML 2.0 are
>> unable to coexist?
>
> I don't see any reason why they can't coexist so long as processing
> requirements for HTML5 do not conflict with processing requirements for
> XHTML 2. As far as I know, they haven't since XHTML 2 moved out of the
> XHTML1 namespace.
Ahem. Someone has kindly pointed out to me that actually the draft
hasn't been updated and XHTML 2 has been moved back into the XHTML1
namespace. That being the case, I can't see how client software could
implement both HTML5 and XHTML2, since they define different procesing
requirements for elements and attributes in the same namespace.
Consider the XML:
<img src="cat.jpg">A black cat playing with a ball of string</img>
If a browser implements the HTML5 spec, then that must be treated as an
image with missing alternative text. So a visual browser might either
display the cat photo or a missing image icon, while a screen reader
might ignore the image, read "image", or attempt to reconstruct
alternative text from the src attribute ("cat").
If a browser implements the XHTML2 spec, then that must be treated as a
cat photo with the alternative text "A black cat playing with a ball of
string".
Again, consider the XML::
<span href="http://www.w3.com">W3.com</span>
If a browser implements the HTML5 spec, that is just some text in a
SPAN. If a browser implements the XHTML2 spec, that is a hyperlink.
Since popular browsers seem more interested in implementing HTML5 than
XHTML2, this seems like a guarantee that they won't implement XHTML2, at
least not as a whole, unless the specs converge on such points.
Of course, that doesn't prevent non-web-browser XML clients and
generators implementing XHTML 2, allowing the standards to coexist in
that sense.
For example, you could have a serverside database storing blog articles
in XHTML 2 format, transform them to the XML serialization of HTML5 for
output to web browsers, but dispatch them as XHTML 2 over WebDav to some
sort of XML authoring tool on your desktop … or something.
--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
Received on Friday, 9 January 2009 12:50:14 UTC