Shocking changes on the horizon in XHTML 2
Ever since I first learned about the W3C, their mission; and understood their role as an organization to set the standards, semantics, and overall best way to deploy web-based technologies to the world, I appreciated their work, and thought very highly of most of their recommendations.
And as of 2006, work on XHTML 2.0 is underway. But for some people (including myself) the XHTML 2 working draft seems controversial because it breaks backwards compatibility with all previous versions of HTML, and it's also described by some, in effect, as a whole new markup language created to circumvent XHTML's limitations.
You be the judge. Here are some "new features" brought into the HTML family by XHTML 2.0:
- HTML forms will be replaced by XForms, an XML-based user input specification allowing forms to be displayed appropriately for different rendering devices.
- HTML frames (which I thought were deprecated by the CSS position:fixed property) will be replaced by XFrames.
- DOM Events will be replaced by XML Events, which uses the XML Document Object Model.
- A new "list" element, the <nl> element, will be included to specifically designate a particular list as a navigation list.
- Any element will be able to act as a hyperlink, e.g., <li href="articles.html">Articles</li>, similar to XLink.
- Any element will be able to reference alternative media with the src attribute, e.g., <p src="lbridge.jpg" type="image/jpeg">London Bridge</p> is the same as <object src="lbridge.jpg" type=image/jpeg"><p>London Bridge</p></object>
- The alt attribute of the <img> element has been removed: alternative text will be given in the content of the <img> element, e.g., <img src="mike.jpg">My picture</img>
- The header elements (i.e. <h1>, <h2>, <h3>, etc.) will be deprecated in favor of the single element <h>. Different levels of this heading will instead be indicated by the nested section elements, each with their own <h> heading.
- The remaining presentational elements <i>, <b> and <tt>, which are still allowed in XHTML 1 (even Strict), will be absent from XHTML 2.0. The only somewhat presentational elements remaining will be <sup> and <sub> for superscript and subscript respectively. All other tags are meant to be semantic instead (e.g. <strong> for strong or bolded text) while allowing the browser to style the semantics via CSS.
Shocking, isn't it? 
Dec 27, 2006
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