Some time back Adam Bosworth wrote an interesting article about what the Web can and does teach us, and about why it's important to extend its capabilities in other areas. However, the Web is itself a poor learner. It is diverse and heterogeneous content. Content serving as information. Information coming from data, by means of... HTML.
The problem is not with the content, but with the structure. HTML has been an excellent markup at that. What some may not know is that its latest (current) stable version, HTML 4.01, is 11 (eleven, as in a soccer team) years old. That beats even the age of the C++ standard, or does it? In an environment that changes so often, that has had a tremendous growth over the past decade, one that can be taken as an example of evolution – what we get to work with inside it is an aged and almost deprecated language acting as a main tool. After so “many” revisions and after such a “continuous” development, HTML has clearly failed to keep the pace with today's Web. It is difficult to express modern and original ideas with a technology that was unable to stay in sync with the very medium it acts upon.
That, in fact, is the main reason that there are so many flavors of HTML, so many flagrant quirk modes, and so many browser-specific markup extensions. HTML5 is coming out a “bit” late. But better later than never. One of the best parts of HTML 4.01 was its simplicity; I believe XHTML has failed (did it?) just because of breaking this rule. HTML5 seems to have observed this, and moreover seems to have learned some key lessons from the semantic Web.
No comments:
Post a Comment