After reading the comments on Jeffrey’s post, I’m surprised and a bit dismayed that people are shocked to hear XHTML2 is dead. It’s been dead for quite some time — just not officially so. As I’ve been saying for the past couple years, HTML5 is the way. XHTML was a nice way to get us all thinking about writing better code, and it helped the Web Standards movement by giving us something to latch onto, but it’s time to let it go, guys. Relax. It’ll be okay.
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001 // Adam Hobson // 07.02.2009 // 7:30 PM
Seriously, some of those people are just panicking for no reason. It’s not like they are being asked to revert back to HTML 3 and font tags. Most of those people are probably already coding in HTML, just with an XHTML doctype since very few sites are actually served as application/xhtml+xml. It’s nice that people are worried about web standards, but most sites could probably switch their doctypes and validate to HTML5 on the spot, or with minimal tweaking.
I’m definitely a fan of HTML5 and I love that I can now markup a whole page without using a single div. Once the browsers start implementing the form features like new input types and client-side validation, coding will become all that easier. Of course, considering the semantic names of many of HTML5’s new elements, there’s gonna be a lot of misuse, and of course the puritans will argue that elements like header and footer are too presentational, but whatever.
002 // Nate Klaiber // 07.03.2009 // 6:37 AM
This was one of the problems with Web Standards in the first place. You had those who were source control police, telling everyone how their markup wasn’t semantic or properly formatted. These same people knew very little about HTML and real world applications.
Next was XHTML. Everyone had to do XHTML, though they couldn’t explain what, or what it really meant for them. Over the past few years, I have never heard a compelling reason as to why people use XHTML. It’s just because the higher up Web Standards bodies said so. These same people were serving up an HTML mime type and never utilizing any type of XML parsing in their document. They were using HTML4, with an XHTML name. Now these people are upset.
This has been a long time coming, if you ask me.