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W3C Goes Back to Drawing Board with HTML

Hoping to build on the previous releases of HTML and XHTML, the World Wide Web Consortium has announced that it will again be reworking the Web Standard to be known as XHTML 2.0

The W3C is inviting browser vendors, application developers, and content designers to help design the next version of HTML by participating in the new W3C HTML Working Group. The active charter allows the group to conduct its work in public and to solicit broad participation from W3C Members and also outside parties.

Soon after HTML 4 was published in 1998, the W3C turned the HTML into an XML based format calling it XHTML. However, due to a broad base of legacy code and lack of rapid browser support, XHTML wasn’t broadly adopted in the wilds of ye old Internet.

As XHTML expanded its usage to mobile and desktop applications, it became clear that a new standard would need to be built to encompass and surpass the previous. That brings us to today where the W3C would like to expand and standardize XML and HTML under one generic umbrella.

Ideas like reusing applicable XML standards, including XForms, XML Base, and XML Events, instead of HTML features that served similar purposes have been put forward from the outset. Those design choices have led to XHTML 2.0 having an identity distinct from HTML.

With the chartering of the XHTML 2 Working Group, W3C will continue its technical work on the language at the same time it considers rebranding the technology to clarify its independence and value in the marketplace.

Demanding some measure of patience from you out there with great expectations, the Working Group is not expected to submit its final recommendation until the third quarter of 2010. No date has yet been set for the XHTML 2 recommendation.

In other W3C news, the CSS Working Group continues to work on the new CSS 3 specification, this past week publishing a working draft of CSS Text Level 3, which defines properties for text manipulation such as line breaking, justification and alignment, white space handling, text decoration and text transformation.

This follows January’s release of Eight New Standards from W3C covered here at CMSWire.

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