Headlining the W3C’s front page is the W3C’s latest Proposed Recommendation, XHTML 1.1 Modularization. Don’t confuse this with XHTML 1.1, which has been a W3C Recommendation since 2001. With the W3C’s many Recommendations and Working Drafts, it’s easy to get it all confused, so let me try to clear things up a little bit.
XHTML 1.1—the document type I’m attempting to implement on my site—is a module-based version of XHTML, but it’s more or less an upgrade of XHTML 1.0 strict. XHTML 1.1 wasn’t designed with the complete modularization functionality that the W3C had in mind. It’s just another slow step in the W3C’s progress to make XHTML module-based.
It doesn’t mean much to me now, but I’ll truly be excited when XHTML 2.0 finally becomes a Recommendation. IBM has an interesting article about XHTML 2.0 if you’d like to read it. It highlights some beneficial changes that XHTML 2.0 will make in designing web pages—that is, if we ever get there. I’d like to see the day where web design is ruled by the standards of its formats (XHTML, CSS) and not by web browsers like Internet Explorer, Opera, and Firefox, whose differences in interpreting web pages gives web designers a headache every day.
One Comment
I think that XHTML 1.1 as the recommendation is really cool, but I definitely holding my breath for XHTML 2.0 when they make the elements more structure based and get rid of all of the extraneous formatting blocks. I’ll be happy once <pre> and <blockquote> and the like disappear.