In the past several weeks there’s been a bit of a stirring in the web design world. This stirring culminated in the announcement that the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) would not re-new the XHTML Working Group’s charter at the end of 2009. The W3C will pool its efforts and focus on the HTML5 specification.
This appears to be good news. No longer will the schism that separated HTML4 and XHTML1 (that formed in 2000) divide web designers and, more importantly, web browsers. The Internet will depend on one specification to markup websites.
I speak from a utopia though. There are still many issues at hand. The biggest drawback is HTML’s past tendency to be sloppy. With certain tags like < img >, XHTML used the wonderful / > closing bracket to signify the end. Every element had to be closed, from your < p > < /p >s to your < br /> and the afore-mentioned < img/>. Another bit of sloppiness is that fact that some web developers type their tags in all caps ( < IMG > or < a HREF > and the like. I grew up learning HTML when the web was making the transition to 3.2, then 4.0. In 2002 I took a web design and development course, teaching the 2001-drafted XHTML 1.0 specification.
XHTML was supposed to be the beginning of the transformation of the Internet, giving us XML parsed documents, more semantic code, and tighter and better developed web sites. Well, that hasn’t exactly happened. Many major websites still don’t adhere to web standards—take a look at Best Buy’s website; it’s nothing but table nested in table nested in table. We’ve still got years to go, and years before HTML5 is finalized and put into popular use on the Internet.
I’ve begun adding elements new in HTML5 to my website. Semantic markup like < div id="header" > has been replaced with the new tag < header >. This semantic markup lets humans and machines know exactly which section is supposed to be and how to interact with it. < footer> is also a new one I’ve updated. The rest will be done over time. If you’re into validating websites, the little CSS and HTML icons in the right sidebar will point you to several errors on my site—all blamed on my looking ahead to CSS3 and HTML5, plus a few third-party code snippets (like PayPal and Facebook Connect) that are really beyond my control in editing.
If you enjoy making websites like myself, I recommend reading up on the changes to come via HTML5. It’s an exciting time. If you can’t see the changes, most notably the usage of @font-face, a CSS rule to use any font the designer wishes, download Firefox 3.5, Safari 4, or Opera 10.