Sourcebits Blog

Seperation of Web

It’s cool that mark-up based web is going to receive two humble gifts from great thinkers of web standards. Not to mention one is HTML-5 (Web Application 1.0) and other is XHTML 2.0. XHTML 2 is effort towards making web more robust, so web can be utilized at its extreme. XHTML 2.0 forces the standards, how to develop the web content which is clean, accessible, structured, searchable, usable and most of all extensible enough to create room for subsequent technologies and languages to plug-in. Idea behind XHTML is to create a host language for various other languages which is been used for web development, regardless of nature or domain of application itself or its users (and even how it works) as long as medium of particular application is web.
In other hand HTML 5 is based on the landscape how the web is used currently. It’s leaned enough to touch the future as well stick to past at same time. It has some wonderful widgets in its bag to be exhibit incrementally, which no one has dreamt of in general. Some of the HTML5 specification has already implemented on latest version of browsers like Opera, Safari and Firefox.
Because specification is still in progress we can expect few years when these specs will reach at its final stage and then becoming recommendation, as per of WHATWG editor’s estimation, it may happen during 2012. Already enough said about stuffs HTML 5 has to offer to web, but I am more concerned about this strong possibility of tearing the web in two or more parts. Do we don’t have enough of incompatibility issues due to inconsistent support of web standards, so we are developing new ones formally.

If one can remember, web-developer bloggers were scratching WebPages with content showing how evil is html 4.0 implementation in past and I swear, most of developers (no wonder if even today) were unaware of any proper difference between XHTML and HTML that time. With time all the effort shown its colour and I believe browser vendors are guilty for whatever is missing, or inconsistent from browser to browser support.
WHATWG (Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group)a community formed by giant browser vendors Safari, Opera, and Firefox, which is responsible for official HTML has submitted the reason of foundation of WHATWG, which reads founders of WHATWG are more concerned about real world web authors. It also specifies the reason why to walk-away from W3Org standards.

Every web-developer worth his salt is agree, its forced implementation of web-standards recommended by W3Org regarding mark-up writing and implementation of XHTML which shown the world glimpse of clean and crisp web, and same time it discouraged the spoilers of web.
Why an average web author will agree on separation of content and style until he is forced. I am agree on point raised that w3org is not very interested in introducing magic widgets for web-apps but why we don’t understand it’s filling more iron in base of structure of web. How one can be sure Web will be rendered identically and continue to render same way if implementations of standards are parallel and mutually exclusive, and worst if everyone is free to implement its own standard even if he is not sure for what standard stands for. I don’t understand why this backward compatibility still there if you are working for totally new thing, whose implementation itself needs mandatory updates of browsers. Like ‘MIME’ type issue, why not browser vendors just simply start supporting XHTML pages as ‘application/xhtml+xml’ instead of ‘text/html’? After all implementation of HTML 5 support will also take some proportion of effort, or vice-versa if W3org has approved specs of HTML5, why can’t they agree on serving ‘html’ pages with html DOCTYPE. Although DOCTYPE and strictness in structure must be required, not optional as in HTML5 specs. If one is so lazy and immature to follow the standard why he is allowed to do real development.

There is one more issue, if browsers stop supporting html, most of the web will be inaccessible, and to implement backward compatibility browsers can have more than one parser (e.g. Flash Player carries two interpreters) which I think already there, remember quirk modes?
Real 100% implementation of HTML5 as per of estimation of WHATWG may start from minimum 2022. It’s a long time block, then why they think there is a need of using old DOCTYPE while purpose of XHTML is purity and transition from messed up code to cleaner code based on standards so in future developer write only sensible mark-up and they don’t misuse the language. But HTML5 wants to continue to giving flexibility of uses to its authors. Strictness in use of mark-up is optional, not forced.

This flexibility adds enough confusion in mind of contemporary developers, because it’s hard to believe supporter of clean mark-up are now advertising ease of use for moron mark-up clerks.

Now it doesn’t matter one wants or not he has to choose from clean mark-up or feature rich mark-up (although both of them has a lot to introduce). Why can’t WHATWG support strictness of XHTML2.0 and rich features from HTML5? After all developers as well users both want functional and extensible mark-up which is easy to use and simple to develop and update, which can be plugged-in to any environment with consistent behaviour, regardless of platform.

As Eric Anderson says, developer’s priority is clean and maintainable code and customer’s priority is feature rich application, so what was needed is feature rich version of XHTML which is able to cater the needs of developer as well customer. I am start hating the situation, there will be time when drivers of web must have to choose either beautiful and dangerous or safe but dry path in web jungle.
Its long way to go do we still have time to merge HTML5 and XHTML 2 in order to give birth one almost perfect mark-up or it’s too late to understand the situation.