W3C: XHTML 2.0 working draft, August 5, 2002.
Changes from XHTML 1.1 are not specifically listed, but here’s what I’ve gathered so far:
- New
DOCTYPE:<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 2.0//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/DTD/xhtml2.dtd"> - The new
nlelement is for navigation lists. - The new
helement andsectionelement are for defining headers and sections, buth1,h2, and so forth are not deprecated. bris deprecated in favor of the newlineelement.imgandapplethave been dropped, replaced by the more flexibleobject.- Forms are out, replaced by XForms.
- The
hrefattribute is now a common attribute, meaning that it can be defined on any element, not justa. Any element can act as a link. - They’ve finally given up trying to distinguish between
acronymandabbr. - You can have your precious
targetattribute back, if you promise not to use it. qhas been dropped, replaced byquote. Browsers are not supposed to put quote marks around aquote; it’s up to the author to do that. This is different from theqtag in HTML 4 and XHTML 1.x (which IE never got right anyway).
Other interesting reading:
- Shane McCarron: What’s new in XHTML 2.0.
- Chris Mannall: Comments on XHTML 2.0 Working Draft. (full thread)
- Simon Willison: notes on XHTML 2.0 and more notes on XHTML 2.0.
- Aaron Cope: Elliotte Rusty Harold’s outline of changes in XHTML 2.0.
- Mike Golding: XHTML 2.0 and Domino.
- Kuro5hin.org: First XHTML 2.0 draft published. Mmmm, figs.
- Dorothea Salo: My miscellaneous comments on XHTML 2.
Point: Keep in mind that this is all just markupbation at this point. This is a working draft, now we’ll have lots of bickering, then we’ll have revisions, then we’ll have a final draft, then we’ll have one last round of bickering, then we’ll have a specification, then we’ll all sit around for two years waiting for Microsoft to implement it, then we’ll spend the rest of the decade complaining that they got it wrong.
Counter-point: Sjoerd Visscher: a working XHTML 2.0 page. Well, my fresh IE 5.5 install asks to download the page instead of displaying it, but it’s been giving me other shit, so maybe it’s just me. Lynx definitely asks me to download it. Looks great in Opera and Mozilla, though. That does it. I’m converting all my pages to XHTML 2.0. Accessibility be damned. Backward compatibility be damned. IE 5 be damned. (IE 5: the Netscape 4 of the new generation.)
