posted Tuesday, January 14, 2003 at 10:20 am MSTN.B.: my blogger.com template has been thrashed /yet again/ ... image gone, counter gone ... *sigh*
Eric Meyer takes the XTML2.0 controversy (best expressed in Mark Pilgrim's rant) head on, coming down on a good point:
"I'm broadly sympathetic with their frustrations, but since I was never that thrilled with XHTML in the first place, I can't get too worked up about the breaks between 1.x and 2.0. I never really got why HTML had to be reformulated as XML. [...] I do broadly agree that XHTML 2.0 is way too unrealistic for its own good. It outright drops too many things authors find useful, [...] On the other hand, if this stuff was deprecated instead of eliminated, I'd have many fewer points of concern about XHTML 2.0..In a good long piece on XHTML2 in his Daily Report, Jeffrey Zeldman opines that " "The problem is one of nomenclature rather than hubris or stupidity."[G]iven that you can take XML and CSS and create your own documents out of whatever markup language you can invent, and use XSLT to bridge the gap between old browsers and new ones, I find XHTML to be of minor import. If it gets too ivory, then it will be ignored, and some other XML-based language will take it place. Or, more likely, lots of markup languages. Either way it will be interesting, and the XHTML 2.0 advocates won't be able to blame anyone else for the explosion of non-interoperable languages. Which, I suppose, is the point of all the sturm und drang of late. If XHTML 2.0 were interoperable with XHTML 1.1, people wouldn't be nearly so upset.
Wow... all this concern over making things work together. Can it be that the Web is all growed up?"
"The W3C seemed to have abandoned the notion that the web could move forward without breaking what we already know and use. Standards had been a lie. The sky was falling.[...] Next day I realized the sky was not falling. W3C does have a problem, but it can be fixed. [...]My hope is that the language I know as XHTML will continue to be gently upgraded in parallel with that different, alternate markup language.
The standards I use every day work for me, and I owe most of them to W3C. I’m giving that organization the benefit of the doubt—and telling them my concerns about XHTML 2.0."
