Jeffrey Zeldman: XHTML WTF. Reading the comments, it’s scary how many people are totally ill-informed about HTML5 and XHTML5.
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Jeffrey Zeldman: XHTML WTF. Reading the comments, it’s scary how many people are totally ill-informed about HTML5 and XHTML5.
Yesterday, you said XHTML1.x users can have their strict syntax by using XHTML5.
Any chance they add
nl,h, and that any element can have thehrefattribute in the next 4563 days?There are only hints of it in this post (more so in the linked stoneship article), but I see a lot of "ZOMG, how can people not know about HTML 5?!?!?!", combined with other pejoratives, floating around the various markup communities lately. I find this tone disappointing, particularly when one of HTML 5's core principles is/was "Most people don't pay attention to correct markup, so let's specify current browser behavior and then give people a path forward if they want it".
Yes, it'd be nice if everyone kept up to date on the progress of the various W3C working groups. They don't. There are a lot of people who asked what professional markup looked like and were told (right or wrong) that XHTML was the future. So they went ahead and learned XHTML, built their websites and chose watching a DVD or spending time with their kids over watching Mark Pilgrim and Sam Ruby do battle over Postel's Law.
Now all of a sudden they're told XHTML is dead. Some wailing and gnashing of teeth is to be expected. What's needed is less "boy aren't I smarter than them" snideness, and more Hey, here's what's up.
Alan Storm - 4th July 2009 11:51 - #
Alan: you're absolutely right, thanks for the sanity check there. It just gets really frustrating seeing the same misinformation come up again, and again, and again.
Torgeir: HTML5 already has <nav>, which serves essentially the same purpose as XHTML2's <nl>. I'm not sure what the line on <h> is - it's not in the spec, so presumably somewhere there's a very detailed discussion about it that lead to it not being included.
I never really understood the benefit of adding href to any element, but at any rate it's extremely unlikely to make it in to HTML5 as browser vendors have raised it as something that's actually extremely hard to support - Anne van Kesteren explains why here.
ishtml5readyet.com is based on another misunderstanding - 2022 is the date by which it is hoped that two 100% complete compatible implementations will be available. Considering CSS 2 (a much smaller spec) has been around since 1998 and still hasn't achieved that, 10 years for HTML5 seems optimistic! The HTML5 spec aims to be feature complete (reaching W3C Candidate Recommendation stage) during 2012, though the W3C's official line quotes 2010 (see the FAQ).
Thanks for the clarifications.
I've read a lot about HTML5 since yesterday's announcement, and now I'm convinced that shouting down the XHTML WG and moving their expertise to the HTML WG is the right thing to do.
Active voice.
Active voice.
Active voice.
Passive voice.
Active voice.
"One of these things is not like the others..."
WHO told these developers that XHTML was the future? WHO wrote books about designing with web standards that pushed the idea of serving an XHTML DOCTYPE with Content-Type: text/html? WHO told "a lot of people who choose watching a DVD or spending time with their kids" what professional markup looked like?
I'm pretty sure it wasn't me, because I was too busy explaining that that wasn't really XHTML, and that if you really really wanted to do XHTML, you'd have to give up more than a few of your favorite things.
Millions of people don't just all go astray in the same direction by themselves. They are LED astray. Who led them? Answer that, and then we can talk.
> WHO told these developers that XHTML was the future?
Why, that was Jeffrey Zeldman more than anyone else.
Though he has a reason to do this. If it wasn't for that 'X' the book wouldn't considered modern at the time.
Agreed with Ivan. And Jeffrey continued it with his title: WTF indeed.
hmmm ... the title was unfortunate, but based on his comments, Zeldman wasn't saying it was wrong to kill off XHTML 2.x, more that he was surprised (but not upset about it).
Even during the days of Peak XHTML, Zeldman had a pretty nuanced view on XHTML even in books where he was advocating its use.
"It's not the band I hate, it's their fans" -- Sloan
huxley - 4th July 2009 18:54 - #
There's no doubt that Zeldman, being the father of the Web Standards movement, is more responsible for people's attachment to XHTML than any other individual. But c'mon...does it really matter? Do we really need to place blame? We ALL know that Jeffrey has done everything he's done with the best of intentions, for the betterment of the web and web design.
I feel like the Web Standards movement, including the encouragement to switch to XHTML, was a necessary evil. We needed the strict, dogmatic, pedantic kind of approach taken by Zeldman, WaSP, and so many others, in order to get both designers/developers and browser makers interested in standards.
The problem, of course, is that some people never move beyond that dogmatic, strict phase of adhering to what someone else told them and start thinking for themselves. It's frustrating, but it's also completely normal.
Everyone involved in the Web Standards movement had the best of intentions, and I think we can all agree it did a lot more good than it did harm. But now, it's clear that we have to reverse some of the rhetoric that was spewed forth with such gusto for all those years.
Jeff Croft - 4th July 2009 19:03 - #
> Alan: you're absolutely right, thanks for the
> sanity check there.
Sanity check? Are you kidding? An essential element of the skillset of anyone (competently) working with web technologies is to pick up new stuff and to think it through for themselves. So it would seem that lots of people read somewhere that XHTML was "professional markup" because it was more semantic than HTML or whatever. And it never crossed their minds to examine that for themselves or come up with a single illustrative example to pin the concept. To associate that kind of half-assed approach to your work with "spending time with your kids" is just asinine.
Foxhall - 4th July 2009 20:25 - #
Mark,
A rewrite of that section:
---
In the late 1990s and early 2000s there were a lot of people who asked what professional markup looked like. Microsoft told them it looked like whatever fit Microsoft's strategic needs that year, Netscape told them "WOW THAT AOL DEAL WORKED OUT GUYZ", Mozilla told them "We'll ship when we're ready", and the W3C said "Look at all our specs, aren't they keen?".
The Web Standards project, (co-founded by Jeffery Zeldman, George Olsen, and Dan Shafer, whose steering committee included Steve Champeon, Rachel Cox, Glenn Davis, B.K. DeLong, Todd Fahrner, Sally Khudairi, Tom Negrino, Dori Smith, and Simon St. Laurent) looked around at the options, and said "XHTML is the future". Individual's motivations for doing so were various.
Countless web designers and web-centric programmers agreed and converted their websites to XHTML and started, both implicitly and explicitly, advocating for XHTML. Their motivations for doing so were various as well.
The people asking what professional markup looked like saw and heard this, flipped the XHTML bit in their head, built their websites, and chose watching a DVD or spending time with their kids over watching Mark Pilgrim and Sam Ruby do battle over Postel's Law, or sticking around for esoteric (but important) discussions on the implications of text/html vs. text/xml.
---
If we want people to understand and adopt HTML 5 over their XHTML + text/html hybrid, we'll have a lot more success doing so by patiently explaining the advantages to them rather than implying they're stupid/out of touch because they lack a particular expertise and experience that we have.
Alan Storm - 4th July 2009 21:26 - #
Here's some more "Hey, here's what's up?"