Although not particularly meaning to think about it, I accidentally began thinking about XHTML 2.0. This wasn’t tremendously desirable, as when I think about things I like to draw some sort of conclusion, and with XHTML 2.0 being so young (unfinished) and controversial, I was afraid of not being able to reach one. However, I had started thinking by this point so it was all somewhat irrelevant.
The big fuss about XHTML 2.0 is that although it is semantically rich and altogether more up-to-date architecturally, it fails to maintain an acceptable level of backwards compatibility with current version of XHTML and HTML and also the user agents in common use. Add its additional complexity (well, it’s hardly complex but it’s a fair bit more complex than simple HTML) and it becomes more difficult to use as well as consume. But …
Isn’t this just XML we’re talking about? XHTML 2.0 is just an application of simple XML, just as XHTML 1.0 was before it. The difference is that unlike its predecessor, XHTML 2.0 doesn’t try to match HTML 4.01 tag-for-tag. But, it’s just XML. It’s a language for marking up a web page in a meaningful (meaning-full) way. No one says that’s what has to be consumed by older user agents do they? Has the whole world lost its head and forgotten XSLT?
The important thing about XHTML 2.0 is that it enables a developer to mark up content for what it is. It’s this document that can be consumed by smart semantically-aware search engines. As for browsers, if they don’t understand XHTML 2.0 natively then I don’t give a stuff. Transform the document with XSLT to XHTML 1.0 and serve them that instead – programmatically. Those user agents that don’t understand XHTML 2.0 can’t make use of the extra information anyway, so transform to 1.0 and let them deal.
It’s not like you’d even need to write the XSLT yourself – once an XHTML 2.0 to XHTML 1.0 stylesheet has been written then it’s written – snag it, use it. You don’t even need to know what XSLT does. Surely it really is that simple? That’s what we have this technology for.
So, write once in XHTML 2.0. Serve twice – once in raw format for UAs than understand XHTML 2.0, once with a standard XSL stylesheet attached to transform into XHTML 1.0 at the server. Sounds like a good solution to me.
As I said, I didn’t mean to start thinking about it.
Comments
Tag your information using XML, try (as an information architect) to make it as symantically correct as possible, then use XSL to translate for older/standards-incompetent (sorry, incompliant) browsers. Serve it up lightly sprinkled with CSS for those which are. Done.
XHTML 2.0 Navigation Lists need richer structural support. Want your new pop-up menu to have a border? The list items don’t have a container element to allow you to do that. Furthermore, navigation lists need to rename their label and li to something more specific for referencing. I like nh(navhead) hb(navbody) and ni(navitem). A navseperator would be nice too. Attributes for specifying the direction of the popup, and its alignment, would also be nice. Effective keyboard navigation of such a navlist is impossible with current html interfaces, so its for point and clickers only.
everything can have a cite or href link? Now that is just hell to write. Duh, put it in an a tag… easier said then done. Furthermore, navigation lists would break if you put an href or cite link on anything but a navigation list item. Even the html, head, and body elements can be turned into links! this is sheer lunacy. I like the idea, but tone it down some, please.
no cellspacing attribute on tables? then at least require that tables no longer have any cellspacing, and that the margins of td and th tags now fill in this role. I’d love this. Kill cellspacing, but make sure you require that it is killed!
preserve all of the meaningful inline text tags from xhtml 1 please. I can take q to quote. They didn’t replace acronym though!
Anything can be turned into an image? O.K., i think i can handle what they want, but it seems rather odd. Even so, <html src=”WTF.gif”> seems like an appropriate reaction.