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Simon Willison’s Weblog

XHTML 2

The W3C have published a working draught of XHTML 2.0. Since the Changes from XHTML 1.1 pages doesn’t appear to have been written yet, here are a few of the most notable differences I’ve spotted so far:

  • Lots of new tags, including <dfn> for inline definitions (similar to <acronym> but even more useful) and <section> for defining logical sections in conjunction with a new structural <h> tag.
  • Navigation Lists!
  • Forms are being replaced with XForms.
  • Goodbye <img> tag! It looks like we’ll be using <object> instead.

Unfortunately with the amount of time it takes for browser manufacturers to implement even simple specifications it could be years before we can start using these improvements.

This is XHTML 2 by Simon Willison, posted on 6th August 2002.

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4 comments

  1. Wouldn't be too difficult to make some JavaScript support for nl tags, though, which might be neat. However, it'd only work if you ran the JS -- it'd be meaningless without, if the browser didn't have support for nl. Might be an interesting experiment to write an XHTML2.0 JS library that made, say, IE a fully compliant XHTML2.0 browser.

    sil - 6th August 2002 11:35 - #

  2. Working draught? What next, a working bitter? ;)

    And <dfn> was in HTML 4 btw - http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/text.html#h-9.2. 1

    Tom - 6th August 2002 14:19 - #

  3. Good Lord, I went through the HTML4 spec with a fine toothcomb a few weeks ago looking for useful semantic tags to define things on my blog and didn't spot that - I have no idea how I missed it.

    Simon - 6th August 2002 14:39 - #

  4. What about <line>?

    that's new i guess...

    I'm terrible scared about <a> i don't know why they didn't mentioned xlink...

    mini-d - 7th August 2002 09:38 - #

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