The problem that xhtml 2.0 faced (and any xhtml adoption for that matter) is
that you're still dealing with the Coding Granny Argument, something that is
used extensively by the HTML purist crowd who frankly do NOT want to see XML
adopted as a lingua franca, especially
for expressing HTML.

Most of you have seen the argument, of course. It runs along the lines of
"HTML has to be accessible to non-programmers. My grandmother should be able
to write HTML code, even if its ill-formed, and have the browser magically
"know" what was the intent of such code, otherwise there will be no adoption
of HTML.

In practice, this argument is specious in the extreme.  The eponymous coding
granny is far more likely  to be writing in a blog engine or wiki in which
the input of content is almost certainly going to be filtered into a final
form for storage, they will likely end up using perhaps two tags, <i> and
<b>, and may even by using a WYSIWYG editor that will let her incorporate
code programatically. It is not, in fact, this user that the argument is
intended to protect, but rather the coder with bad programming habits.

Most framework libraries are unfortunately written by people who may be good
Java or Python or JavaScript of PHP programmers but who have either been
seduced by the notion that HTML can be lazy or are in fact just sloppy. The
irony, of course, is that in nearly all computer languages, if you violate
syntactical rules, the program won't compile. Why HTML has to be the one
language that violates this has never been clear. What's even worse, I can
see it for HTML 4.1, because that language was approved at a time when HTML
was still coded largely by hand, and as such there is a large block of
legacy code that needs to be supported. However, why HTML 5 needs to conform
to this absurdity is still beyond me, and I've yet to see a truly valid
reason for not mandating just an XML format.

There is a second facet to these arguments. The HTML crowd hates, fears and
despises namespaces. Again namespaces mess too much with the Coding Granny
argument, and they add to the complexity of writing inline HTML content for
all of those AJAX programmers who tend to think that the only relevant angle
bracket language is HTML. If Ian Hixie acknowledges the XML argument, then
he also has to acknowledge the validity of namespaces, and I suspect this is
a non-starter for him. By keeping the two languages "separate but equal" he
gets his namespace free language and can then work towards eliminating
namespaces from the spec down the road.

There's supposed to be an extensibility workshop in September at one of the
F2Fs where namespaces in general will be hashed out - I plan to be
monitoring that one carefully, as I suspect that there will be a move to
"fix" namespaces in a way that will have long term negative repercussions
for the XML community.

Kurt Cagle
Managing Editor
http://xmlToday.org


On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 11:51 AM, Jim Tivy <jimt@b...> wrote:

> We have an Xml content management system.  We currently have a customer
> prospect seeking SGML support.  Turns out few vendors are supporting SGML
> anymore and we never plan to support it.  What this means to Xml content
> management is SGML and HTML gets stored as binary files - there being two
> kinds of files in our system: Xml and Binary.  Whereas, XHTML is stored as
> Xml and is thus enabled for the full processing capable - including link
> mining and checking.
>
> Whether HTML-5 is the path to a fully Xml compliant XHTML (including
> namespaces) or whether XHTML-2 is I don't know.  Seems like XHTML 1 and 1.1
> have established XHTML.
>
> I think SGML needs to die out as do its descendants like HTML.  The W3C
> should say in the HTML5 specification that the SGML serialization is
> deprecated. Perhaps new features do not have an SGML serialization. I
> really
> don't think young people are learning SGML and I never plan to learn it.
>
> As a small point, perhaps a mime type called text/xhtml needs to be used
> rather than the longer application/xhtml+xml.
>
> As well, I thought the buzz on the street for website builders was to use
> XHTML transitional.
>
> Jim
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________________________________
>
> XML-DEV is a publicly archived, unmoderated list hosted by OASIS
> to support XML implementation and development. To minimize
> spam in the archives, you must subscribe before posting.
>
> [Un]Subscribe/change address: http://www.oasis-open.org/mlmanage/
> Or unsubscribe: xml-dev-unsubscribe@l...
> subscribe: xml-dev-subscribe@l...
> List archive: http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/
> List Guidelines: http://www.oasis-open.org/maillists/guidelines.php
>
>