It’s been interesting to see the back–and–forth discussion between CSS guru Eric Meyer and lead Safari developer Dave Hyatt on Apple’s proposed Dashboard extensions to HTML. At first Eric nearly hit the boiling point, but he is now working constructively with Dave to help him extend HTML in as safe a manner as possible. I’m glad they’re working together on this, because this is pretty important to get right. HTML could certainly use enhancement, but we can’t afford to implement these enhancements and in so doing FUBAR validation entirely.

The really exciting thing about Dashboard is that Apple clearly intends Dashboard widgets to be as easy to write as possible. This is one of the main reasons that they’re targeting HTML, as opposed to XHTML exclusively. Dave points out that:

“First, it was suggested that the widgets be written in XML rather than HTML and that all of the new tags and attributes be namespaced. However, this would have dramatically increased the complexity of crafting Dashboard widgets. People know how to write HTML, but most of those same people have never written an XML file, and namespaces are a point of confusion.”

This has of course drawn out legions of Markup Experts to snigger that XHTML isn’t so hard, Apple should do things properly in XHTML, Apple is just being “lazy”, how dare they muck with rotten old legacy HTML, any developer worth their salt can write XML, et cetera. For amusement, I bounced around the web this morning checking out these arguments. I validated five pages in a row. One hundred percent were serving up their arguments as non-well-formed XHTML.

Replication of this experiment is left as an exercise for the reader. In the meantime, I’m thinking of taking up watercolor painting.