Grauw’s blog

Two of the presentations I saw at XTech today were particularly interesting. First, the XHTML 2.0 lecture by Steven Pemberton from the W3C, a pretty charismatic man :). The WHATWG presentation after that was also interesting. I talked about the WHATWG’s standard unofficially called ‘HTML 5’ with Ian (the main person behind it) afterwards, but I think that I still like XHTML 2 better. From a document authoring point of view.

Not that I dislike Web Forms 2.0 and Web Apps 1.0 (the two WHATWG specifications), <canvas> and the standardization of DOM0 and XMLHttpRequest is great, but I don’t like all of it, such as <article>, <aside>, <nav>, etc. tags. I prefer XHTML 2.0’s ‘role’ attribute, like <section role="navigation">. Especially as it can be extended (microformats is the term that comes to mind).

The relevant papers:

• XHTML 2.0 (Steven pretty much read it up literally although he gave it some extra ‘touches’ here and there)
• Web Forms 2.0 & Web Apps 1.0

Anyways, I see much overlap between XHTML 2.0 and ‘HTML 5’. I wish they would be more similar (in particular, that Web Apps would be more like XHTML 2 in applicable areas ;p). There was noticable controversy between the two ‘camps’, and perhaps that would alleviate it somewhat, and also be less confusing to the end user. I would like to see ‘HTML 5’ being an intermediate format between XHTML 1.0 and XHTML 2.0 (or a 2.1, which incorporates WHATWG stuff).

A couple more links:

• David Baron: Make way for ducklings
• Ian Hickson: Spring 2005 Travelog: Part 1 (Amsterdam)
• Robert O’Callahan: XTech

I also talked to Michael Day about Prince, an awesome technology of which a long-awaited new beta was released this week. And also to Rob Relyea, a Microsoft employee, about XAML.

Tomorrow, the last day. Short, with primarily some speakers from the W3C. Should be interesting.

(Technocrati tag: XTech)