Okay, first thoughts:
On Mon, Jul 6, 2009 at 11:54 PM, Aryeh Gregor <Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.comSimetrical%2Bwikilist@gmail.com
wrote:
It's clear at this point that HTML 5 will be the next version of HTML. It was obvious for a long time that XHTML was going nowhere, but now it's official: the XHTML working group has been disbanded and work on all non-HTML 5 variants of HTML has ceased. (Source: http://www.w3.org/2009/06/xhtml-faq.html)
That page clearly says that there will be an XHTML 5. XHTML is not going away.
- Delete '<meta http-equiv="Content-Style-Type" content="text/css"
/>'. Which is a really stupid element anyway. :P
- Delete name attributes from all <a> elements. They've been
redundant to id for eternity, and every browser in the universe supports id; we can finally move these to the headers themselves.
- Remove comments from inside <script> tags with a src attribute. I
already did this in r52828, since they're pointless anyway.
Good ideas.
* We can use HTML 5 form attributes. These will enhance the
experience of users of appropriate browsers, and do nothing for others. At least Opera 9.6x already supports almost all HTML 5 form attributes. (Source: http://www.opera.com/docs/specs/presto211/forms/) We could, for instance, give required fields the "required" attribute, which will cause the browser to prevent the form submission and notify the user if they aren't filled in, without needing either JavaScript or a server-side check.
What's to prevent a malicious user from manually posting an invalid submission? If there are no server-side checks, will the servers crash?
- Once this goes live, if no problems arise, try causing an XML
well-formedness error. For instance, remove the quote marks around one attribute of an element that's included in every page. I suggest this as a separate step because I suspect there are some bot operators who are doing screen-scraping using XML libraries, so it would be a good idea to assess how feasible it is at the present time to stop being well-formed. In the long run, of course, those bot operators should switch to using the API. If we receive enough complaints once this goes live, we can revert it and continue to ship HTML 5 that's also well-formed XML, for the time being.
Why be cruel to our bot operators? XHTML is simpler and more consistent than tag soup HTML, and it's a lot easier to find a good XML parser than a good HTML parser.
So, while I see some benefit to switching to HTML 5, I'd prefer to use XHTML 5 instead.