Some years ago (about 13 or 14) I coded a website (and have of course coded others since then) and stored it on Geocities (no longer around). I did this in XHTML because that was the new HTML standard. The idea (or so I thought) behind XHTML was to transition web documents from HTML which supports sloppy markup to XML documents (which must be written as a well-formed document). Making the transition to XML would essentially be a move to creating intelligent documents as documents are self-describing. This in turn would empower Internet searching to be more exact in search results and also reduce Internet traffic. The ultimate idea was to create what is now coined as the "Semantic Web".
Then along comes HTML5. HTML5 contains self-describing tags such as <element>, <footer>, <article>, etc. The questions that present themselves are; with the introduction of HTML5, have we abandoned the move to XML? Will we continue to release new HTML standards? Why did we need HTML5 in the first place? What is the primary goal of HTML5? Is it to push the Semantic Web? If so, doesn't XML do that already, and do it better? Is it the push to remove the need for plugins such as Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight? If this is the primary goal then I can understand.
Don't get me wrong, I understand the need for HTML. If you need non-persistent information then HTML is the way to go; however, for persistent data that can be shared easily with others, isn't XML the proper choice? Will the web ever make the move to XML (with the caveat that HTML can be easily created using XSLT)?
Response from
ReplyDeleteThe way I understand it from previous years is that HTML5 was originally proposed instead of XHTML, at least the idea behind it but the W3C instead wanted to push forward with XHTML. I may be off base here but originally I thought HTML5 (which I guess would have actually been HTML4 at the time) was to provide a singular way to use markup language for web documents. It would also introduce features that wouldn't rely on plugins, such as audio and video (instead of object).
HTML5 has obviously evolved and although I don't really keep up with web development, the focus seems to be the ability to make web pages real multimedia documents. With the evolution of HTML5, we can see that web page documents can become much more complex - in presentation without relying on a 3rd party and hopefully specific browser support. It would also seem that because of this, some market HTML5 development as "web applications" where before technologies such as ASP/ASP .NET, PHP, Ruby on Rails, etc. were specifically utilized for this.
I have seen some technology journalists in the last year speak of HTML5 as an actual development engine for mobile applications, this is really because of tools such as Nomad for Visual Studio where HTML5 can be used to develop an app for iOS and Android, though this is more because of the nomad engine itself rather than HTML5 being natively supported for actually executing code on either of these outside of web content.
As to your comment about XML and the web, I'd say the web already uses XML quite a bit without being integrated into the HTML front-end. XML is used to store or at least present stored data in many different online applications. Other than that, from what I understand XML can be used with HTML5 as well, though it isn't considered an HTML5/XHTML5 thing because HTML5 is unified.
I have a simple understanding of HTML5 as I've inferred before, so again, I may be offbase quite a bit and I'd welcome some education on the subject.