HTML 5 wins over XHTML 2.

This post actually echoes my first post on the subject (in French). Here we are, another hedge to cross for Mauritian web designers and companies. Too bad, just at the moment when Mauritian companies like E-services have started going towards web standards (repect for that though there’s still a lot to do). So, what is this hedge, the dropping out of XHTML. Yes Sir! XHTML is dead. Well metaphorically.

When?

The W3C has announced last week that it will be dropping XHTML 2 and allow more resources to the HTML 5 workgroup. This means that the expected date of use of HTML 5 is getting nearer. FYI, it was expected in 2022, now just give it 3-5 more years. So, the first question is: why are they dropping XHTML and what to expect from HTML 5?

Why?

There’s one simple thing to take into consideration. How come we all used IE6 at one time (about 90% of the world population having access to the web at that time did) and went completely mad when more reliable and standards bases browsers came out? The answer is: most browsers at that time followed HTML. Standards were vague and HTML, being very permissive did that pages were rendered quite nicely even if there are errors in the code.

XHTML has never catered for errors (at least for critical ones). You mess up a tag, you mess up a site: simple. This is the reason why browsers such as IE 6 had trouble reading such code because they hadn’t been coded to fully understand that code. Going back to HTML will allow web designers to cater for these past generation browsers more easily. No more MSIE_CSS.css and no more hacks then.

What a change! This, however is not over. The change will also occur in the code. How? Semantics. With the rise of web standards we have started to build websites on a semantic basis. We usually use the “document” ID, the “nav” ID, the “header” ID when styling our pages. These selectors have been so much used that they will be given due respect in HTML 5. We will now have new block elements such as