Post Archive

› January 13, 2003

Mark Pilgrim on semantic obsolescence

  • Reported by Joshua

Mark Pilgrim is very upset about the new XHTML 2.0 working draft, specifically the lack of the cite tag, which makes his posts by citations semantically obsolete.

“Which means that, after keeping up with all the latest standards, painstakingly marking up all my content, and validating every last page on my site, I'm still stuck in a dead end.”

Mark has every right to be angry because he's followed all the recommendations and invested a lot of time into showing others how to do it. I know I'd be upset if the same thing happened to my site.
UPDATE (Jan. 14): Masayasu Ishikawa of the W3C notes that cite will be put back in the next draft.

Comments

1. January 13, 2003 06:38 PM

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Nate Posted…

It's nice to see a little dramatic tension when it comes to otherwise rather dry stuff like XHTML. I wonder if there's a chance some that some of the items mentioned might work their way back into the document before it becomes a recommendation? They don't yet even have a consise list of changes yet.

2. January 14, 2003 02:54 PM

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Nate Posted…

An elegant answer by zeldman

3. January 14, 2003 09:21 PM

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James Posted…

Reading some of the discussions on the w3c HTML mailing list. I'm very afraid. The reason the web took off is because everyone could write HTML with nothing more then a few hours instruction for even the slowest. I of course recognize that HTML has to evolve but I still think it has to be easily loanable, simple enough for anyone to pick up, and relatively fast to code. Yet I don't think XHTML 2.0, which will one day (even 10 years down the road) will be the de-facto standard. Just look at a few quotes. "I don't know how high the priority for XHTML 2.0 is, but I see other W3C projects that are IMHO more important. " (LINK So one what will be the main language of one of the greatest modern communication tool is a low w3c priority? Point me to one thing that has a higher individual user base as well as author. There was another quote which I'm having a hard time finding again that stated something like "Ask developers not designers" about the importance of a semantic tag. He incorrectly assumes that developers do most of the xhtml/html code. When it's more often then not done by designers. Even more importantly it should be easy not only for designers but for Joe Average. They are the most vital user base imho and I simply don't see them being catered to.