I realize that in my last entry, I never really answered the opening question, “Are Standards Crap?” If you couple my failure to answer the question with my disparaging remarks about forward compatibility, standards, and XHTML 2… you might come to the conclusion that I think standards are crap.
Well, I won’t offer a non-apology apology — I take full responsibility for my lack of clarity. So here’s what I really think. Some standards are crap, and some are fine, or even good. HTML 4.01 has its quirks, but on balance it’s a fine standard. CSS 1 and 2 are excellent, and I’m eagerly looking forward to version 3. XHTML 1, I’m less thrilled about. Still debating this one internally.1
And as for XHTML 2? Well, let’s have no ambiguity here. Check out this gem from the public www-html lists:
From: “Ernest Cline”
To: www-html@w3.org, www-html-editor@w3.org
Date: Wed, 09 Apr 2003 20:31:25 -0400
Subject: [XHTML2] Poor little old <a>Let’s face it. There is very little purpose that <a> serves in the
current working draft. About the only thing it still has going for it
is that links specified by <a> are still supposed to look like links…
The thread continues with a chorus of yeas.2. Not one dissenting voice. Heck, why keep the poor little old <a> tag, anyway? Oh, I dunno. How about because the <a> tag has been the primary linking mechanism in HTML ever since the the very first version of the language, you blithering…
Arrrrgh. Sorry about that. It just irks me to no end that the XHTML 2 folks are not only purposefully breaking backward compatibility (which is bad enough)… but they seem to be taking a gleeful pleasure in the destruction of the old. What gives? Who let these people in, anyway? Who gave these people the keys to the vault, and why aren’t the soldiers guarding the entrance?
This would all be less troublesome if only the XHTML 2 people would listen to Zeldman’s comments from a few months ago and name their specification something else. “Advanced Markup Language”, or “Semantic Markup Language”, or something like that.3 Then we could proceed with good conscience.
But instead, here’s what’s going to happen. In less than a year, the XHTML 2 people are going to push their vision of the Semantic Web out on us. Thousands of web designers are going to jump on the bandwagon and unthinkingly start slapping XHTML 2 DOCTYPES on their websites. The browser makers will ignore the new standard. Or mis-implement them. Or divert valuable resources that should be used to improve the current standards. And thus, in five or six years we’ll have a mismash of incompatible browsers and tag-soup pages pretending to be XHTML 2. By that time, the designers of XHTML 2 (by then XHTML 2.2) will be bored and champing at the bit to unleash XHTML 3 on the world. Wheeee.
What a train wreck.
1. Right now I’m thinking XHTML 1 qualifies as “Mostly Harmless”.
2. The thread continues with a digression into whether one could keep the <a> tag around if it was used for nesting links like the (currently useless) <object> tag, along with an off-topic discussion of whether to dump the <acronym> tag.
3. Of course those are bad names too, because they imply that HTML isn’t advanced and isn’t semantic. But you get the idea.