A technology intended to build a more powerful web from the ground up, XHTML 2 met a quiet end last week, spotlighting the difficulties of internet standardisation.
Introduced in 2002, XHTML 2 was the centerpiece of standards work at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). However, incompatibility with existing web standards and a direction at odds with developers' desires meant it was doomed from the start. On Thursday, after a long reconciliation with the browser makers who worked in a different direction, the W3C announced that it will wind down development of XHTML 2 this year.
Ultimately, browser developers have the upper hand in charting the web's future.
The W3C will now channel resources into standardising what browser makers have been toiling over all these years — HTML 5, a sprawling collection of new features to improve the present HyperText Markup Language. However, elements of XHTML 2 will live on in HTML 5.
"XHTML 2 was a beautiful specification of philosophical purity that had absolutely no resemblance to the real world," said Bruce Lawson, HTML 5 evangelist for browser maker Opera.
So what went wrong? In short, the web has many masters, but the ones with final say over its nature are those who build it page by page, not the standards group trying to create a new foundation.
XHTML 2 was designed to reform the web as a medium for publishing documents, but developers — and the browser makers that listened to them — wanted a platform for interactive applications. While that direction did prevail, its incarnation in HTML 5 faces its own set of challenges.
Trying to chart the future
The consensus for HTML 5 support has been building for years, and the W3C had increased its involvement in its standardisation before it decided to put an end to much of the competing XHTML 2 standard. Although the HTML-XHTML split has been fractious at times, there is inescapable tension between standards groups trying to chart the future and vendors whose products relate to those standards.
So if HTML 5 is now the way to go, why was so much energy, time and research invested in XHTML 2? It was an attempt start afresh without HTML's shortcomings.
Why XHTML?
XHTML "was a cleaner and better-architected version of HTML", according to Smith. And in its earlier years, it had support. "At the time when XHTML 2 was first conceived and specified in the early drafts, everybody thought it was a good idea. A lot of people, in hindsight, want to make the claim that they knew it wasn't going to be successful," Smith said.
While XHTML 2.0 made it to working draft stage, only parts of the specification will live on in HTML 5. One example of its utility was the tight coupling of textual information with graphs encoded with...
