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Mike Champion wrote:
>
> For what it's worth, I see the benefit of XHTML 2 as precisely that it
> *is* yet another standard. The result of shunning
> "yet another standard" IMHO will be that some non-standard
> "son of Flash" or "son of Blackbird" will predominate once HTML
> is too old and tired to be worth the trouble.
Son of Flash or Son of Blackbird would have to have a compelling
business case for anyone to care about it. Microsoft could not make an
announcement that they are inventing a hypertext language for markup
(HTLM) and expect anyone to care. They would have to say that they were
inventing a remote gui language or a remote multimedia language or a ...
something exciting. At that point there should be a standardized
competitor, perhaps called XHTML 2 or something else. But until someone
has a clear statement of a problem that needs solving, or an application
domain that is going untapped...
What I don't understand is why XHTML 2 is NOT taking a bold swing at an
interesting new problem domain. What if it supported rich GUIs? What if
it brought metadata to the masses? what if it was tightly bound to SVG
so that every element could be filtered and transformed.
> XHTML 2.x seems like a declaration that there is an immense
> amount of value to be preserved in the HTML legacy, but there is also
> some refactoring to be done, and it's best to do this in relatively
> quiet times. The old saw about "you have to break some eggs to make
> an omlette" comes to mind.
Refactoring for its own sake?
I'm not saying that XHTML 2 does not matter. I'd just like to see some
more leadership from the XHTML working group. "We've got a bunch of bold
new ideas. Here are the ideas and here's how we plan to put them into
XHTML 2."
> If not now, when? If not the W3C, who?
When there is a problem to be solved it should be solved. Perhaps that
is now. Perhaps not.
Paul Prescod
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