XHTML 2 is dead. Long live HTML 5!

On Thursday 2nd July the W3C announced its plans to discontinue the work on the XHTML 2 specification.

Here is the official announcement: “Today the Director announces that when the XHTML 2 Working Group charter expires as scheduled at the end of 2009, the charter will not be renewed. By doing so, and by increasing resources in the HTML Working Group, W3C hopes to accelerate the progress of HTML 5 and clarify W3C’s position regarding the future of HTML.”

This confirms a feeling that has been growing among those observing the recent developments in the group. To understand why XHTML 2 died and the implications to the future of the web, let’s first look at what XHTML 2 was supposed to be.

What was XHTML 2?

The first draft of the XHTML 2 specification was published in 2002 and had the objective of creating a markup language that not only obeys the strict XML rules but also further separates document content and structure from document presentation. Other goals included increased usability and accessibility, better integration with the Semantic Web, improved internationalization and more device independence. To achieve this, a lot of old baggage from the previous XHTML specifications was dropped or modified. One prominent example is the lack of the <img> tag in XHTML 2. Instead, any element can be an image or another resource. This is achieved by allowing the src attribute for all elements. If the src is present and can be displayed inline, it will be inserted. If it can not be displayed, the inner content of the element serves as the alternativ text.

Because of the high ambitions that came with XHTML 2, backward compatibility was regarded to be less important. This allowed cleaner, more concise language that corrects many of Web markup’s past indiscretions.

A bit of history

After XHTML 1.1 became a recommendation in 2001 work on the XHTML 2 specification started. Right from the beginning, the focus was not on backward compatibility. The statement accompanying the publication of the first XHTML 2 specification draft in Aug 2002 reads “…while the ancestry of XHTML 2 comes from HTML 4, XHTML 1.0, and XHTML 1.1, it is not intended to be backward compatible with its earlier versions.” A second and third draft of the specification quickly followed in the same year.

In spite of many innovative ideas, the group’s aims of totally reworking the standard was not loved by everyone. Especially browser vendors criticised that many concepts were too removed from reality. For this reason, in 2004, Mozilla, Opera, Google and Apple 2004 decided to create their own working group named WHATWG (Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group), independent of the W3C.

In 2006 Tim Berners-Lee, the founder of the W3C, decided to include the WHATWG as a competing group in the W3C. The group took over the HTML working group, while the developers of XHTML 2 were placed into a newly created group. The HTML Working Group continued developing specifications for the HTML 5 standard. While HTML 5 and XHTML 2 existed in parallel from then on, it became more and more apparent that the industry support for XHTML 2 was quickly diminishing. The last Working Draft of XHTML 2 was published in July 2006. Because the focus of the W3C was now on HTML 5, the death of XHTML 2 comes as no big surprise.

What is HTML 5?

The resources of the XHTML 2 working group will now be transferred to the HTML working group, which is working on the HTML 5 specification. This raises the question of how HTML 5 differs from XHTML 2. The approach of the HTML working group is much more pragmatic. The HTML 5 specification mostly maintains compatibility with the current HTML specifications. One of the main aspects of HTML 5 is to move the focus away from document markup.  Instead, HTML 5 is designed to be a language for web applications. A large part of the specification is aimed at creating a more robust, feature-full client side environment for web application development by providing a variety of APIs.

Many parts of HTML5 are already making their way into current browsers. Having the support of Microsoft, it is very likely that features of HTML 5 will be rapidly incorporated into most standard browsers. For this reason HTML 5 promises to be the future of the web.

Did strict markup die along with XHTML 2?

With XHTML 2 being the successor of XHTML 1.1, one might wonder whether strict XML markup is also a thing of the past. The answer to this is a very clear NO. The HTML 5 specification is the description of a vocabulary that you can write in two different syntaxes, html and XML, depending on your developer needs, markets and applications. These syntaxes are called serializations and the XML serialization is called XHTML 5. For the html serialization simply start the document with <!DOCTYPE html>. If the document is written in XML then the DOCTYPE should be omitted and instead the enclosing html tag should look like this: <html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml” xml:lang=”en”>

Implications for the web developer community

A line has been drawn under the high flying ambitions of the XHTML 2 project. This means that web designers and web developers can now be sure that HTML 5 will, in due time, become the recommended standard. This is currently mostly of interest for the browser developers. On the other hand we, the web design and web developer community, should also take notice of this development. It is our communities that finally shape the appearance of the web, making best use of the standards. It can certainly not be wrong to make oneself familiar with the ideas that may shaoe the future of the web.

Some examples

HTML 5 specifies a series of new html tags such as <footer> that represents the footer of the document or of a section of the document. But more than just specifying new html tags and their meanings, the HTML 5 specification contains many APIs that developers can exploit using JavaScript. One interesting element to note in this context is the <canvas> element. The canvas element provides an API with which a script can generate 2 dimensional graphics in the document. The element is already supported in many browsers such as Safari, Firefox, Opera and Chrome. The only major browser not currently supporting the canvas tag is the Internet Explorer.

What’s next?

As things stand the WC3 hopes to go to a ‘last call’ phase with HTML 5 later this year. This will move the specifications one step closer to becoming recommended standard. After that it will certainly take some time before all browsers fully implement the standard. But with only one standard to focus on and most browser vendors supporting it, one can hope that things will progress more quickly and more uniformly than in the past.

Tags: future of the web, HTML, standards, W3C, XHTML

Written on Monday, July 13th, 2009 at 1:15 pm.
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