Professional's Domain

It seems that the competition of the future web standards between HTML 5 and XHTML 2 has come to an end – just after the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) announced that it is going to increase available resources to HTML 5 by DISCONTINUING further development of XHTML 2.

Both two drafts were said to be leading the future of the web. Innovations in HTML 5 includes the structural enhancement of information representation by the idea of sectioning elements, introducing exciting elements such as figure and m, and even the interactive Canvas which integrates much of the functionality that currently can be only done in Flash or Silverlight. XHTML 2, on the other hand, take another way. The main goal of XHTML 2 is to build a completely structure oriented information representation.

Unlike the relationship between the two current standards HTML 4 and XHTML, where the latter is mostly a syntax complement of the former, HTML 5 and XHTML 2 are much less related. XHTML 2 tries to make webpages more like xml files by forcing to focus on the information structuring. HTML 5 is to make a more interactive web by focusing on web applications, although it also introduces optional mechanics enhancing the structure.

The new decision made by W3C clarify its position of accelerating the progress of HTML 5 as well as the future the web. Actually, demands of new web standards have been called for a pretty long time and different HTML extensions introduced by different companies have brought huge chaos to the current web.

Meanwhile, WC3 hopes to go to a ‘last call’ phase with HTML 5 later this year, which would seek community confirmation of the work that has been done. Afterward, there would be a candidate recommendation phase and development of a test suite. It’s time to bring the web back to order!