

The Long Road from XHTML to HTML - deepakjois
http://nimbupani.com/blog/the-long-road-from-xhtml-to-html.html

======
jamesbritt
So, what do folks here use?

I was a fan of XHTML for a while, largely because it made it easier to use XML
tools to verify my documents. But that became a non-issue as HTML parsing
tools (specifically what I could use in Ruby tools while developing) got
better.

I wasn't serving my pages as application/xml, and on consideration of what Ian
Hickson wrote (<http://hixie.ch/advocacy/xhtml>) I went back to using HTML 4.

I'm puzzled by suggestions to use HTML 5. it seems a peculiar reversal from
the "design with Web 'standards'" mantra. It's not a W3C recommendation, it's
still a draft.

If XHTML is not working out as planned, why not use HTML 4.0.1, a current W3C
rec that works?

~~~
axod
IMHO, HTML5 addresses real needs. VIDEO+AUDIO tags, awesome. Some other really
useful things as well.

My money is firmly on HTML5.

Just because it's not a standard, doesn't mean it's not usable. You can
already feature detect and use audio tags where available etc.

~~~
jamesbritt
"You can already feature detect and use audio tags where available etc."

OK, but isn't this the grounds for people griping about various flavors of IE,
that you have to have behavior checks for X number of browsers because they do
not follow a W3C rec?

~~~
ZeroGravitas
I think you'll find that the "X number of browsers" you need to check for and
use fallbacks from HTML5 are "various flavours of IE". So please, let the
griping continue.

This is because Microsoft has, for a long time, dragged its feet regarding the
web because the web is a threat to its core business. In fact two main strands
of HTML5 development are reverse engineering IE peculiarities and making them
a standard so that others can interoperate and investigating ways to fix up IE
with javascript shims so that it can support HTML5 without any help from
Microsoft.

This is not the "right way" to do things but when the monopoly browser (and
OS) producer varies between apathy and antagonism towards the web that's how
progress gets made.

------
ableal
_This was in 2000-2003. With the gift of hindsight we know now that XML was
not the future_

Some people at the time tried (un)common-sense. Fortunately they took the
trouble to whack the ... erm, "rough edges" out of the fashionable groupthink
(e.g.
[http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/01/14/thought_experime...](http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/01/14/thought_experiment)
).

Thanks to them, we now seem on the way to HTML5, which I agree it looks like a
good idea.

