XHTML2

Hello World in XHTML 2.0

URIs

The whole dialect appears to be bound to no less than four URIs (one repeated).

http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/DTD/xhtml2.dtd
http://www.w3.org/2002/06/xhtml2/
http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance
http://www.w3.org/2002/06/xhtml2/
http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/SCHEMA/xhtml2.xsd

Namespace

I look to Atom as the example of a pragmatic XML-based solution to a far-reaching problem. Even for XML, it is very concise: it’s a markup language for exchanging markup fragments with metadata, and does so without weight or ambiguity. Atom can include XHTML without a heavy hand.

<summary type="xhtml">
  <div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
  ... HTML Content ...
  </div>
</summary>

It’s not hard to imagine SVG embedded in the same fashion.

Version

Doctype declarations mean everything to HTML, it can make the difference as to how a browser renders a page. It is the least decipherable element in an HTML document, however, and is outclassed by the simple ‘version’ attribute in Atom’s top-level element.

<html version="2.0" type="strict">

Hello World

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/css" 
   href="http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/style/xhtml2.css"?>
<html version="2.0" lang="en" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2002/06/xhtml2/">
  <head><title>Hello World!</title></head>
  <body><p>Hello World!</p></body>
</html>

Far more succinct, I think. Still some weight, but then I did unnecessarily add a style sheet. My document is XHTML, Version 2.0, English with a single URI for definition.

Pessimism

As much as I long for this minimalist approach, I am pessimistic. Pragmatism will give way to politics and lose our chance to refine and develop the language that defines the web with the patterns that have emerged over 10-15 years.

HTML 5 purports to derive from these patterns, but appears to throw in everything without thought to structure: effectively lurching in the other direction.