What's new in XHTML 2.0

XHTML 2.0 vs 1.0

[KathyJones]

What's new in XHTML 2.0: What are the new features in XHTML 2.0 that are not in XHTML 1.0?

[tedster]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld, Kathy. It's a timely topic. Let's get ahead of the curve a bit and avoid nasty surprises, right?

As far as I know, the W3C is now up to a fourth public "working" draft for XHTML 2.0 [w3.org]. Nothing is necessarily fixed at this point, although we can surely count on the general direction.

XHTML 2.0 is mainly about extending the spec to many types of smart machines - not just conventional computers. I expect HTML 4 still to be supported for a long time - especially the strict version. So no one should be freaking out - but we all should be paying attention.

Another focus for XHTML 2.0 is quite important - filling in some of the gaps that exist between previous versions of XHTML and the functionality that is needed/wanted, and even used to be available through earlier HTML.

A good read is this article on O'Reilly's XML.com [xml.com]. It dates back to last summer, so it refers to the first public draft, not the current one.

Another reference here: WebReference.com on changes in XHTML 2.0 [webreference.com].

One of the working questions I see would allow
any element to take an image map. That certainly
would open up a new world, wouldn't it?

[tedster]

A few comments on three of the proposed changes in XHTML 2.0:

****

One major new element that's still being proposed for XHTML 2.0 is the navigation list. The syntax is pretty much what you'd expect:

<nl>
<li>link 1</li>
<li>link 2</li>
<li>link 3</li>
</nl>

The idea is to set aside navigational elements with their own list. The User Agent treatment for non-visual browsers is still undecided, and the default visual treatment is said to be "fairly abstract."

What I don't really get is why a new kind of list is needed at all.

****

How about this - they're talking about deprecating the <br /> tag. The replacement would be a <line></line> element that would both begin and end with a line break.

I hear this has something to do with helping out XML consistency -- but isn't it just a way to bloat the code? Seems like <strong> vs. <b> all over again to me, only worse.

****

Then there's the CAC, or Common Attribute Collections. These make groups of attributes available for a whole bunch of tags. The commonly touted example is replacing this:

<h2><a href="http://example.com">Header Link Text</a></h2>

with this:

<h2 href="http://example.com">Header Link Text</h2>

That's only one example. I can see that having each tag accept a certain collection of attributes will help keep things straight. And for a change, there's actually a savings in code size.