Some time ago (late 2002, I believe) plans were put in motion to develop new web standards for the internet community. The brains at the W3C decided that it was important to migrate much more to XML based coding and further away from traditional HTML. This was mainly due to the increasing amount of mobile devices that supported internet browsing, as well as moving closer to 'purist code'. As such a draft version was put in motion for XHTML 2.0, the new web standard that would concentrate on structure and validation and bypass many of the limitations that (X)HTML was subject to. After its first review, the language proved a contentious topic as not only was it not backwards compatible with previous (X)HTML versions, but seemed to be created as a new markup language, and not an updated version.

Upon its initial draft release it seemed to some web developers that the W3C had decided it would proceed with its own design without any collaboration with developers and designers in the industry. As several such developers stated: 'it smelled too much of ivory towers and too little of the trenches' making reference to the high and mighty powers dictating proceedings, oblivious to the developers in the trenches - those that actually build the sites. Others however greeted the proposals with enthusiasm, eager to evolve web standards into the future. The majority of web developers though paid it little heed, and up to this point still do.

What's New
Well it would seem quite a lot. From the initial draft on the W3C website, I found a lot of familiar tags I use frequently no longer exist or have been altered into new tags. Elements like <br>, <img> and <a> tags were replaced with <l> (line), <object> and <hlink> respectively. Bizarre considering that <object> has never worked properly on Internet Explorer. In fact the changing of the <a> tag kicked up such a fuss with developers, that in a later draft the tag was returned. Besides these small changes HTML Forms and Frames are to be replaced with their XML equivalent, Document Object Models Events will now be replaced with XML Events and any element can now contain a hyperlink. So in the new specification hyperlink
<li href="index.html">home</li> would function the same as
<a href="index.html">home</a>.

Just from the first draft it seemed there was a lot of confusion and disagreement, even causing some of the senior minds at W3C to leave their posts and head off to work on other projects. It certainly didn't look good and made many, including myself, question the point of this so called update to a newer set of standards that was designed to make things easier. Is this simply change for the sake of change?

Competition
As if the rather lukewarm reception of its last two drafts wasn't enough, Mozilla Foundation, Safari and Apple jointly proposed that a new working group at the WC3 adopt the WHATWG's model, HTML 5.0. Five months ago, the new WC3 group did just that, and is now currently working on the new standard. The difference with HTML 5.0 is more focus on compatibility with older browsers than accessibility; directly opposite to XHTML 2.0's approach. Purists argue that the HTML 5.0 is 'wrong', but if the two groups separately working on this project come together at some point, there's the very real possibility this will catch on first.

Final Word
So what's the final word? Well XHTML 2.0 is still in draft, and by the looks of things will most likely continue this way for quite some time. There is obviously a lot of elements that still need revising and many developers are still not happy with a lot of the new tags. Currently internet browsers don't support XHTML 2.0, but when they do, and when XHTML 2.0 is finally released, this version might be backwards compatible. In the meantime however, HTML 4, XHTML 1.0 and 1.1 are still the recommended languages for the internet.

The bottom line is no browser maker intends to stop supporting these formats, and they expect this to continue working for some time yet. In my opinion, the current XHTML standards and HTML4 seems to work fine and has paved the way for cleaner code and more universal access for everyone. I think that change should be made for improving functionality and accessibility for all, but closer collaboration between developers would eliminate many of the problems that are currently cropping up. The fact that XHTML 2.0 is now five years in the making (previous versions were incorporated within two) and still in draft specification suggests that there is still a long way to go. So stick with HTML 4.0 or XHTML 1.0/1.1 for now, as this is most likely going to continue to be the standard for at least the next few years. XHTML 2.0 might be the next big step in website development and herald a new era of web design, but I guess we'll still have to wait and see.