log

July 7, 2009

XHTML2

It takes only a brief skim through the com­ments on Zeld­man’s XHTML2 death post to realise just how many peo­ple have absolute­ly no idea what’s been going on in their indus­try for years. Or why they even start­ed cod­ing to a par­tic­u­lar stan­dard in the first place. Or why they con­tin­ue to do so.

Prag­ma­tism be damned it seems; bet­ter to act Chick­en Lit­tle and bemoan the death of some­thing they’ll nev­er use whilst par­rot­ing inac­cu­rate FUD about HTML5 than to do a bloody Google search and read the first line of the first result. XHTML con­tin­ues on in HTML5’s XML seri­al­i­sa­tion (skip to Doc­u­ment Rep­re­sen­ta­tion), with all the fea­ture ben­e­fits of the ‘clas­sic’ seri­al­i­sa­tion that appar­ent­ly caus­es the imme­di­ate heat-death of the uni­verse if used.

You’re free to keep using XHTML and include what­ev­er tal­is­mans make you sleep well at night. Copy/paste every shred of meta­da­ta markup you can find that reg­u­lar surfers won’t see and search engines will large­ly ignore. Exces­sive use of the lat­est W3C XML spec for mark­ing up indi­vid­ual char­ac­ters will ensure your page is absolute­ly per­fect. Meanwhile…

What did we actu­al­ly gain from XHTML?