Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

XHTML hasn't revolutionised web page markup (it brought with it draconian changes {read: made web page markup more XML-like} and is now being replaced by HTML5, which makes some {all?} of its changes irrelevant).

RDF isn't as widespread as it could be (it could be used in Facebook and Wikipedia but isn't, for example).

(And I haven't even heard of FOAF.)

I wouldn't call these huge successes.




XHTML has revolutionized page markup. Not because everyone is using it but because it blazed the path for better standards that the other document types follow. Also, many of the changes in XHTML were brought over to HTML5 - which does have an XML definition.


"Also, many of the changes in XHTML were brought over to HTML5 - which does have an XML definition."

Yea, the so-called XHTML5 that will be finally supported in IE9, BTW.


Just out of curiosity, what is an example of a draconian change that was added by XHTML?


If you're properly serving XHTML 1.1, you're supposed to use the application/xhtml+xml Content-Type, which means browsers are supposed to FAIL to render the page if there are any well-formedness erors.

It turns out that's a really bad idea on the Web.

Further reading: http://diveintohtml5.org/past.html




Join us for AI Startup School this June 16-17 in San Francisco!

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: