Simon Willison’s Weblog

The Way Forward

14th June 2003

Dave Shea: The Way Forward:

HTML will die. Today’s internet is obsolete, and anyone still coding in HTML 4 is planning the obsolescence of their own code. The big picture says that if, and this is a big if, but if we can move to an XML-based internet, then revisions to markup languages, existing and new, don’t require browser updates. Once we have user agents that fully support an eXtensible Markup Language, and the style sheets used to format it, then it doesn’t matter anymore if we lose the <cite> tag, or if <img> gets dropped. We create our own damn subsets that include them, and everyone else can use our subsets without downloading a new agent! Wouldn’t that have been convenient 5 years ago...

Read the rest of the post for more insightful thoughts on where XHTML is headed and why it makes sense to get stuck in to it as soon as possible.