On Mon, Dec 29, 2008 at 7:24 PM, Tei <oscar.vives(a)gmail.com> wrote:
So... I must move my money from the XHTML bank to the
HTML 5 bank?
MediaWiki seems to output XHTML just now, that it all seems the very
best option now.
We output XHTML1, which is effectively HTML4 with some syntactic
differences. Except we don't always output valid XHTML1, of course,
even according to the (sometimes too narrow) standards of the W3C
validator.
What? will mediawiki evolve to HTML5?
I hope so. I've been meaning to write up an argument that we should
begin explicitly moving in that direction in the immediate future.
Also, another HTML? why?
Because XHTML beyond version 1 added various features people didn't
want, removed features they did want, and didn't add many new features
that were actually useful, so nobody was or is interested in either
using it or implementing it. Furthermore, it didn't (and doesn't)
account for backward compatibility in the fashion that implementers
demand it be accounted for.
HTML5 adds many incredibly cool and useful features, removes a bunch
of baseless restrictions and technicalities (it's now possible for a
"hello world" document to take less than ten lines!), is focused on
the needs of modern websites, is standardizing a huge amount of stuff
that was formerly undocumented, and has taken the explicit stance that
nothing will make it into the final version of the spec unless it has
multiple interoperable implementations.
the idea of "broken code must render
anyway"
is riped. It must die, a painfull dead, because is the father and
mother of the tag soup, that is more vile than the Borg and Microsoft
*combined*
Browser vendors are not willing to remove support for it, because it
would break old websites. HTML5 says broken code is invalid, but aims
to standardize in great detail how browsers should render it anyway,
instead of demanding (impractically) that they throw up their arms and
die like XHTML insists on. A "feature" of XHTML that practically
everyone skips in practice by serving it as text/html.
Of course, HTML5 also changes things so that a lot of code that's
unambiguous and that XHTML would declare invalid is actually valid.
For instance, this is a completely valid HTML5 document:
<!DOCTYPE HTML>
<p>Hello world!
There is absolutely nothing ambiguous or broken about that, and
(leaving aside the doctype) it was always valid HTML before XHTML came
along.