Did I miss asking any question to any of them? Post a comment with the question, and they will answer.
— Jesper 
“They’re sitting around trying to create The Perfect Markup Language.” - Mark Pilgrim
Do you view the recent re-inclusion of the style attribute as a softening of the working group’s stance that XHTML 2 be strictly structural (eg: perfect) or that the style sttribute can (somehow) be viewed as structural and not merely a presentational hook.
Also, do you feel that recent browser developments, namely that the next version of Internet Explorer will not be released until 2005 (and then only to users of Longhorn) will force the working group to soften even further as it looks like older UserAgents will be around for many more years than previously anticipated?
Perhaps the IMG tag will br brought back once they realize it is unlikely to work in +90% of browsers even by the year 2010.
— MikeyC
Forgive my ignorance, but what is the rationale for removing the img tag?
I was thinking, there should (in my crazy world) be a CSS ‘image’ property, which can be set to YES or NO. Yes, there are probably a hundred reasons this is a bad idea, but I like it =]
so if
.myimage {
image: YES;
}
then you’d say
http://path.to.my.image
obviously you could choose to override H8 or something to make that less typing.
I hope this displays… my HTML might get pruned out.
OK..yea, HTML got eaten.
it was
[p class="myimage"]http://path.to.my.image/p.
Hopefully that works =]
“Forgive my ignorance, but what is the rationale for removing the img tag?”
Forgive my ignorance as this is only my uneducated guess but I think it has to do with the IMG tag having little semantic value. It is preferable to use the Object tag eg: <object type=”image/gif” data=”example.gif” >this is fallback text</object>. It allows you to nest one object within another so that if the browser doesn’t understand the outermost object type, it cascades down to the next one. The only problem being that Internet Explorer still has some major problems with the Object tag.
“I was thinking, there should (in my crazy world) be a CSS ‘image’ property, which can be set to YES or NO. Yes, there are probably a hundred reasons this is a bad idea, but I like it =]”
I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about or how it relates to CSS at all.
— MikeyC
Re: re-introduction of style attribute. This is great news, but it’s a little like watching the erosion of privacy rights in Congress. Draconian bill is introduced, everybody groans, Slashdot froths, EFF protests, eventually parts of it are scaled back and everybody cheers. Hey, folks, look at the larger picture: we’re still worse off than we were before we started.
In this case the stakes are obviously much lower, since it’s just a markup language, but the process seems to be the same. Massive changes are proposed, everybody froths, small parts are scaled back, everybody cheers.
— Mark
MikeyC is right, the OBJECT tag is where it’s at in XHTML 2. Actually the way the OBJECT tag works serves the same purpose as what Steve is proposing, because the ultimate fallback of the nested OBJECT tags can be plain text (or text with markup). See here for how it’s supposed to work:
http://www.petesguide.com/WebStandards/tests/object/
Note that the OBJECT tag is not new; it’s been around for years. And IE/Win gets it almost completely wrong, so nobody uses it (except for ActiveX controls).
What’s new in XHTML 2 is the reliance on it to the exclusion of more specific elements, like IMG.
— Mark
And no, I don’t believe Microsoft’s browser plans will have any impact on the Working Group. Since they have unburdened themselves from the goal of backward compatibility, the current state of the world is almost completely irrelevant to them.
— Mark
“Massive changes are proposed, everybody froths, small parts are scaled back, everybody cheers.”
I’m not cheering. I don’t like XHTML 2 as it lacks real world value, but at least (at one time) i could admire its “purity”. But now, its no longer “pure” as the working group has obviously compromised it and yet it still has very little real-world value. So now I actually like it even less than I did in the beginning. They’ve pissed off the purists *and* the pragmatists.
— MikeyC
Whoops I accidently used one of the 7 banned words…sorry Mark.
— MikeyC
“In this case the stakes are obviously much lower, since it’s just a markup language…”
Yeah, that’s the hairy part, I think. It is, ultimately, a matter of preference for the time being. Then again, even if accessibility to online information never actually becomes quite a necessity but rather just nearly so, these are the bones over which the skin will be pulled. It’s frustrating that something so petty should need to be taken so seriously.
— Muraii
I wonder how long it’ll be until some non-W3C group comes along and migrates XHTML to where people actually want it. I want a name element.
— Lach
Mark, I’m curious as to why you think it important that XHTML 2.0 be backwards-compatible, rather than a reinvention. I draw a rather different lesson from the HTML 3.0 debacle: the IETF (then W3C)’s mistake was not in trying to define a nifty improved language, but in trying to force it to play in the same space as the latest “innovations”. Consider the HTML spec post-HTML 3.2 (formalized tag soup): HTML 4 defines an upgraded language with greater semantic character (and some kludges left over from 2.0 and 3.2), and deprecates presentational markup. Result: people write tag soup. HTML 4.01: tidies up various errata to the spec. Result: people write tag soup. XHTML 1.0: stuffs everything into almost-compatible XML syntax, including those presentational tags people seem to keep using, despite being long-deprecated. Result: people write tag soup. XHTML 1.1, etc.: Noodling with modularization. Result: …I think we get the picture, now don’t we?
Let’s face it: most of the Web *likes* tag soup. Structural markup is just some bizarre hassle, and they’re not going to do anything *but* tag soup without being threatened with red-hot irons. The small percentage of people who are genuinely interested in creating useful structural markup are also those well-equipped to create and translate content into a reinvented XHTML (and probably Gecko/Opera/KHTML users, at that).
The only people who are going to make meaningful use of XHTML 2.0 whenever it’s released (and probably not even then, if IE isn’t one of the two interoperable implementations) are the clueful. Why not create a language that reflects that?
— Chris Hoess