dive into mark

Monday, January 13, 2003

Semantic obsolescence

  1. XHTML 2.0 working draft of 5 August 2002.
  2. XHTML 2.0 working draft of 11 December 2002.

Specifically:

  1. XHTML Text Module of 5 August 2002.
  2. XHTML Text Module of 11 December 2002.

More specifically, the acronym, q, and cite tags are all gone, leaving us, respectively, with abbr, quote, and nothing. The acronym/abbr thing just means a global search and replace; q/quote means a quick hack in my Movable Type macros, but the lack of a cite tag makes my posts by citation semantically obsolete. (Ironically, Brian Donovan tried to warned me about this, but he didn’t know that the facts supported his exact conclusion.) (This paragraph has been edited to acknowledge the presence of the quote tag.)

No, the cite tag and the cite attribute are not the same thing. The cite attribute is a URL; the cite tag is wrapped around actual names within your text.

Let’s not even talk about the dropping of img and applet, the deprecation of br, and the proposed deprecation of h1 through h6. Oh, and forms, which are now XForms.

I know, I know, XHTML 2.0 isn’t meant to be backwardly compatible. But damn it, I’ve done everything the W3C has ever recommended. I migrated to CSS because they told me it would work better with the browsers and handheld devices of the future, then the browsers and handheld devices of the future came out and my site looked like shit. I migrated to XHTML 1.1 because they told me to use the latest standards available, and it bought me absolutely nothing except some MIME type headaches and (I am not making this up) Javascript incompatibilities. I migrated to semantic markup that has been around for 10 fucking years and they go and drop it. Not deprecate it slowly over time, mind you, but just fucking drop it. 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.

Find me another site that is as semantically rich (other than Joe Clark, who is years ahead of me). Hell, find me another site that even uses XHTML 1.1. (All right, a few blogs use it, but even the W3C home page only uses XHTML 1.0.) I bought into every argument the W3C made that keeping up with their standards, validating with their tools, and using their semantic markup would somehow future-proof my site and provide some mystical forward compatibility. How about some fucking payoff now? How about some fucking compatibility?

Standards are bullshit. XHTML is a crock. The W3C is irrelevant.

I’m migrating I’ve migrated to HTML 4.

(Next day: you should read the continuation of this story.)

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