|
|
Posted by Lachlan Hunt on 12/06/05 15:08
uranther wrote:
> http://whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/
>
> HTML 5.0? What's the nature of this? What's the point? Are they
> trying to rebel W3C? I thought XHTML 2.0 is the future.
Initially, it all started because they (including Ian Hickson and a few
others from Opera, Mozilla and Apple) weren't entirely happy with the
direction that the W3C were headed in with many technologies. XHTML 2
isn't really backwards compatible with existing browsers and will take a
very long time for support to increase sufficiently for it to be used.
AIUI, the W3C also weren't really interested in addressing "web
appications", particularly not in a backwards compatible way.
In order to address these areas, the WHATWG was formed to publicly
develop and enhance existing HTML4 and XHTML1 markup with much needed
semantics. In addition to this, the web apps spec will also document
error handling and parsing behaviour for HTML in a way that will both
increase interoperability between browsers, while retaining backwards
compatibility with millions of legacy documents.
For example, HTML 5, unlike HTML 4, is no longer considered an
application of SGML. In reality, it was never really implemented as
such by anything but validators anyway, and it is thus likely that
widely unsupported SGML features (eg. many SHORTTAG features) will not
be retained.
These days, it seems the W3C may well have changed their position with
the recent announcement of the Web APIs Working Group and the Web
Application Formats Working Group, who are intending to work with groups
like the WHATWG, Web Standards Project, DOM Scripting Task Force, etc.
--
Lachlan Hunt
http://lachy.id.au/
http://GetFirefox.com/ Rediscover the Web
http://GetThunderbird.com/ Reclaim your Inbox
Navigation:
[Reply to this message]
|