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Re: Has HTML5 saved XHTML?

• From: Jesper Tverskov <jesper.tverskov@gmail.com>
• To: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
• Date: Mon, 22 Aug 2011 09:51:45 +0200

Hi Chris Burdess

When I write:

"The perspective is not that HTML5 is deprecated in the long run and
that XHTML5 will take over one day. The perspective is rather, that we
finish off even the lip service about the XHTML5 track next time
around. Who cares, no one is using it."

It is only a provocation to make a point. The HTML5 spec makers find
it very important to be backward compatible. We can be pretty sure
that the XML track will remain in the spec also in the future.

You are right in saying that "Nobody is using HTML5 either really" in
the strict sense of validation. But as a matter fact any webpage ever
made, served with "text/html" is today a HTML5 page except that it
might have one or more validation errors.

You don't have XML pages with well-formedness errors. If you use
"application/xhtml+xml" you get a nice web page or an error message.
There is no such thing as XML with a few well-formedness errors.

The important thing is that more than 99% of web pages use HTML
parsing. Probably also more than 99% of new web pages. For that reason
you can not blame some HTML5 spec makers that they are a little tired
of the XML track in the HTML5 spec.

You also point to an interesting fact, that browsers are today also
browsers in smartphones, tablets, etc. My 5 years old Nokia N80
supported "application/xhtml+xml" and my iPhone 4 renders XML webpages
incrementally.

But that is not that interesting. It is pretty easy to set up mimetype
switching in your server-side script, I do it where I have the URL
rewriting.

The title of the this thread is "Has HTML5 saved XHTML?". An even
better title would probably be: "Has HTML5 given XHTML a second
chance?".

Cheers
Jesper Tverskov
http://www.xmlplease.com

• References:
  • Has HTML5 saved XHTML?
    • From: Jesper Tverskov <jesper.tverskov@gmail.com>
  • Re: Has HTML5 saved XHTML?
    • From: Chris Burdess <dog@bluezoo.org>