A couple of important things happened over the last few months that most people might have missed.

FACT
The Director of the W3C announced on July 2nd the the XHTML 2 Working Groups charter would not be renewed beyond the end of 2009. Henceforth resources would be redeployed to the HTML5 project.
http://www.w3.org/News/2009

FACT
Around the end of May, Google switched their homepage over to HTML5 Doctype. The head of the HTML5 group, Ian Hickson works for Google.
The company is obviously making a very big bet that HTML5 will drive the future of the web and they are hoping to lead the charge.
http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/05/goo...on-html-5.html

FACT
XHTML was a fake anyway.

Remember that scene from the Matrix where the guy says
"Hold on to your seats, cause Kansas is about to go Bye-Bye..."

Well there is a similar shock in store for XHTML fans.

Most people who are familiar with whats under the hood of their web pages would know this tag.
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
You are likely to see it in almost every page source you check.

The key piece of code to focus on here is:
content="text/html"
This is the MIME type which identifies the content as HTML, which means that user agents must parse and interpret the contents as HTML.

You heard correctly! All your beautifully formed XHTML code gets
relabeled by the MIME type and parsed as its shabby old school HTML cousin so far the browser is concerned.

Why do this?
Well the plot thickens and our usual villain Internet Explorer plays its usual spoiling role. I turns out the IE does not recognize the correct XHTML MIME type which is application/xhtml+xml. Even IE8 will choke and ask you if you want to download the file if it hits this encoding. There are hacks to get IE to recognize the MIME as html/text but really, whats the point. If the content is suitable for html/text you might as well use the html/text MIME to begin with. Which most of us do.

So why the big fuss about XHTML in the first place?

MYTH
"You need XHTML to do Ajax".
Wrong.
Actually you don't need a DOCTYPE at all for that purpose.
The Google homepage (in)famously didn't have a DOCTYPE until
the recent change and yet "Google Suggest" still worked just fine.

MYTH
"XHTML is good for Accessibility"
Wrong.
Actually the WCAG1.0 says this:

We should 'create documents that validate to published formal grammars' (checkpoint 3.2, priority 2), 'use W3C technologies when they are available and appropriate for a task and use the latest versions when supported' (checkpoint 11.1, priority 2) and 'avoid deprecated features of W3C technologies' (checkpoint 11.2, priority 2).
http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/WD-WCAG10-T...e-presentation

HTML 4.01 Strict DTD covers all of those bases.


But wait a minute! There must be some benefit of using XHTML?
Well perhaps, but not much.
People who like tidy, consistent, human readable code usually like XHTML because the validator enforces case sensitivity of tags, balancing opening and closing tags and so on. The HTML4 validator is more lenient and also allows the coder to forget a few tags which it classes as optional but the XHTML validator does not. But (mostly) the browser will still do a respectable job of working around sloppy code. The real issue is when DOCTYPE is omitted entirely and browsers are sometimes forced into quirks mode. But that is a separate issue from XHTML versus HTML.

Basically, XHTML was hyped up when it first came out and then the developer community realized it wasn't all they hoped.

Conclusion
Its going to take a lot of years for all the browsers to fully implement HTML5 but ultimately it will happen. CSS evolved in much the same way, slowly at first but quickly gathering steam. Already Opera supports many of the HTML5 features and it won't be long before the others surely follow.

Check out this Sitepoint article to see what HTML5 has to offer in the way of new semantic tags.
http://www.sitepoint.com/article/html-5-snapshot-2009/

Other sources: http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/show...p?t=393445#q12
http://annevankesteren.nl/2004/08/mime-types

Lets get something straight here. XHTML is NOT DEAD!!! What is 'dead' is XHTML 2, it was never going anywhere anyway. There is NO REASON to stop using XHTML and I, for one, will NOT discontinue it's use and HTML 5 is NOT ready, barely supported and I'm not going to waste any time and energy on it for a long time coming. When it's more supported by browsers, when it gets closer to an actual WORKING draft, I'll give it more attention, but that will be years from now!!

Originally Posted by LadynRed

Lets get something straight here. XHTML is NOT DEAD!!! What is 'dead' is XHTML 2, it was never going anywhere anyway. There is NO REASON to stop using XHTML and I, for one, will NOT discontinue it's use and HTML 5 is NOT ready, barely supported and I'm not going to waste any time and energy on it for a long time coming. When it's more supported by browsers, when it gets closer to an actual WORKING draft, I'll give it more attention, but that will be years from now!!

Ha ha.

I think it was Mark Twain who said
"Rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated".
But even he died eventually didnt he?

I guess a more accurate post heading would have been
"The future of XHTML is dead"

Believe me, I've got no great desire to rewrite all my code either
but I think ultimately we are all going to have to learn
to come to grips with HTML5 or we risk becoming
one of these coding dinosaurs who hugs their tables based
layouts.

And if Google is getting behind HTML5 it might be sooner than you think.

John Resig (creator of jQuery) had this to say:
"If there was ever a time to start playing around with the jump to HTML 5, now would be it. Since HTML 5 is a superset of the features provided by HTML 4 and XHTML 1 it ends up being surprisingly easy to 'upgrade'"
http://ejohn.org/blog/html-5-parsing/

Well, us dinosaurs have heard that tables are dead for over ten years now
and yet W3 is using them.

Blah Blah Blah, Html 5

HTML is dead, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah

http://www.webmaster-talk.com/html-f...-of-xhtml.html
http://www.webmaster-talk.com/html-f...-from-w3c.html
http://www.webmaster-talk.com/html-f...xhtml-2-a.html

Originally Posted by LadynRed

Lets get something straight here. XHTML is NOT DEAD!!! What is 'dead' is XHTML 2, it was never going anywhere anyway. There is NO REASON to stop using XHTML and I, for one, will NOT discontinue it's use and HTML 5 is NOT ready, barely supported and I'm not going to waste any time and energy on it for a long time coming. When it's more supported by browsers, when it gets closer to an actual WORKING draft, I'll give it more attention, but that will be years from now!!

I strongly agree with everyone you stated. I always enjoy reading your posts. I however never seen you get so frustrated / upset over a post.

ultimately we are all going to have to learn to come to grips with HTML5

No argument there, we will and I will, I'm just not going to sweat bullets over it until it's really usable in most browsers - which it is not. Same goes for CSS3 - not ready for 'prime time' just yet.

I however never seen you get so frustrated / upset over a post.

Naah.. not so much. I'm just tired of the same re-hash of the same mis-information that's been going around for weeks - saying "XHTML is DEAD" when it is NOT at all, that statement is just not accurate.

The point I was trying to make is NOT that you need to throw away all your
existing XHTML pages. Not at all.

Simply that the FUTURE has been decided.
And the future is HTML5.

As Resig described it, HTML5 is really a Superset of existing HTML4 and XHTML1.0 anyway, so you could probably just change your DOCTYPE and go on living happily ever after. He has changed his Blog to HTML5 DOCTYPE already.
http://ejohn.org/blog/
And if you inspect the source code, it looks pretty familiar to anyone familiar with current XHTML tag syntax.

But people should also know that there are some exciting new benefits and possibilities that HTML5 throws open.

1) Better support for screen readers and accessibility devices. Instead of a page being a bunch of semantically identical Divs its possible to Label a <Nav>, <Footer> and so on that can be easily targeted.
2) More HTML hooks for CSS coders play with, thus eliminating some of the need for Class and ID attributes.
3) Consistent video and audio support across browsers.
4) Clearing a path for Open Source Rich Media
Read:
http://www.infoworld.com/d/developer...ilverlight-291

Dang! I just got used to XHTML and CSS and now you want me to move to HTML 5.

Us table era dinosaurs only move so fast.....

Originally Posted by LadynRed

No argument there, we will and I will, I'm just not going to sweat bullets over it until it's really usable in most browsers - which it is not. Same goes for CSS3 - not ready for 'prime time' just yet.
Naah.. not so much. I'm just tired of the same re-hash of the same mis-information that's been going around for weeks - saying "XHTML is DEAD" when it is NOT at all, that statement is just not accurate.

I completely understand what your saying. I've read alot of blogs and other items that say the exact same thing. I guess in ways I don't really care because after all its pretty 'stupid'. I think any knowledgeable web designer / web master is going to know the truth.