[LINK] Killing the Web?

[Rick Welykochy]

Tony Barry submitted:
 
> <http://www.zdnet.com.au/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2636521,00.html>
> Killing the Web?
> Things keep change with the Internet and the Web. The elegant
> simplicity of plain HTML is being shoved aside in favor of the
> increasingly complex XML scene.

Another example of reportage from someone unfamiliar with the
standards involved and how they are being applied.

"XML is, in many ways, a vague standard insofar as definitions of
 XML elements are concerned"

Precisely the opposite is true. XML is well-defined. HTML is not.
XHTML is a 3-tiered progressively introduced proposal to clean
up HTML. There are certainly no death knells being sounded for
HTML.

The main thrust of the article is wrong. XML is not poised to replace
HTML. XHTML is the usurpent. XML goes way, way beyond text markup
and page presentation. And yes, the complexities of style sheets,
XSLT and Xpath are partners to XML which will enable far more sophisticated
and content-rich applications. But none of the complexity mentioned
in the article are required for a proper implementation of XHTML.
As a matter of fact, the transitional DTD for XHTML is tag-for-tag
nearly completely compatible with HTML 4.0 but ties down the language
so that all XHTML compliant browsers will finally do their job in
the same way.

Claiming that simplicity is being forsaken for a slow, buggy, complex,
daunting Web is simply untrue. That description accurately describes
the state of the web now.

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Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services Pty Limited