XHTML 2, The W3C, and Despair
I’m going to keep this short and sweet. Mark and Zeldman, two people who don’t read this blog, have been complaining about the W3C and the embryonic XHTML 2.0 spec.
I’ve gone through the anger that Mark has regarding web standards, and I promptly gave up being angry at the W3C.
The W3C’s problem is that although they are one of the most important organizations on the Net, they refuse to let things “percolate.” While we’re looking at the XHTML 2.0 spec, we must realize that there are still millions of pages that are using HTML 4 Transitional because of incomplete implementations in all the browsers.
The W3C is asking us (developers) to move forward, while we’re still asking our users (and our browsers) to take valid XHTML 1.1. And in two years we’ll see an XHTML 3.0 spec, just as we’re starting to “plan for the future” by migrating our XHTML 1.1 pages to 2.0. Our users will be at least two steps behind the W3C.
It never ends.
What we as developers need from the W3C is a guarantee that the XHTML 2 spec will remain frozen for at least five seven years before they start springing new things on us.
After all, just how far can HTML go? How far does it need to go? In the end, it’s all just XML+ CSS.