Thursday, March 08, 2007
The next HTML
For a long time, the official aim of W3C was to replace HTML with XHTML and not do any more work on HTML. This hasn't really been happening. Web page creators continue to generate HTML which doesn't come close to being well-formed XML. Finally W3C has given in to this reality, and is launching a new HTML working group. This group's charter aims for both an HTML and an XML version of the revised markup language, so that there won't be growing divergence between HTML and XHTML.
Among the anticipated features are "Networking APIs for server-push, asynchronous two-way client-server communication, peer-to-peer communication, and client-side cross-domain communication." This could be very valuable, allowing highly interactive pages without the mountains of kludgy JavaScript which are needed to obtain such effects today.
