XHTML2 new draft out

From the W3C dated 6 May 2003

[Hester]

A new draft of the XHTML Specification has been released by the W3C! Address: [w3.org ]

Some interesting new ideas in there. You can now embed alternate images into tags like 'p'! Eg:

<p src="holiday.png" type="image/png">
 <span src="holiday.gif" type="image/gif">
  An image of us on holiday.
 </span>
</p>

Wild!

There's a new tag called 'standby', along with others that are new or refined. I like the idea of the 'edit' one.

There's too much to take in right now, so take a look. Has anything major been dropped from the previous draft? Anything mindblowing they've added? Let me and others here know!

[msgraph]

Thanks Hester! I read through some stuff before but I'm interested in seeing what this new draft has.

The standby element looks very useful.

[drbrain]

<edit> will be even better than HTML4's <ins> <del>

The target= attribute is back :(

Reading some of the stuff in green (unresolved issues) is very cool.

The rest of this I'm not sure if it was/wasn't in the first draft:

xml:base attribute looks cool

Should we allow any element (such as <p>) that contains a number of hyperlinks to be an image map?

I haven't yet used imagemaps, but... cool!

onclick will now use XML Events

Metadata profiles look promising for improving the ability to categorize documents.

h, section, heading instead of h[1-6] (possibly), cool

Heh, you can even put the src attribute on <title>, also:

There has been a request for facilities to reduce the need for duplicating title and headings.

var, blockcode, code, kbd, and samp will make writing technical documents a breeze.

[Hester]

var, blockcode, code, kbd, and samp will make writing technical documents a breeze.

It struck me while reading the new draft yesterday that so many elements are carried over from HTML. So why can it not be backwards compatible? All you need is a browser able to cope with the new code. Any elements missing on a page written in HTML 4 can be translated on the fly. Eg: <nl>text</nl> becomes <br />text. That way there won't be a "two-class" web, split between HTML or XHTML 2 documents and browsers.

[BlobFisk]

Thanks Hester, that'll make some interesting reading over the weekend.

Like you, I find the idea of the edit collection quite interesting. It certainly pushes the language more in line with the ideas of the Semantic Web.

[aspr1n]

Just wanted to add something into this discussion that's occurred to me regarding the spec. There is still no inclusion of a form element that I believe in windows is called a combi-box - effectively a combination of:

<input type="text" />

and

<select type="text"> 
 <option value="value"></option> 
</select>

I would suggest:

<select type="text"> 
 <input type="text /> 
 <option value="value"> 
</select>

This would allow a user to add text into a drop down list.

I know there is now a proposed xForms spec, but as it wasn't released until November 2002, I think we can assume that it is going to be a while before browsers support it.

asp

[madcat]

<p src="holiday.png" type="image/png">
<span src="holiday.gif" type="image/gif">
An image of us on holiday.
</span>
</p>

Wild!

Hey- I'm a slow drinker today, what's going on here?

[tedster]

From the Block Text module:

In comparison with earlier versions of HTML, where a paragraph could only contain inline text, XHTML2's paragraphs represent the conceptual idea of a paragraph, and so may contain lists, blockquotes, pre's and tables as well as inline text.

Good stuff. I never understood why it wasn't that way from the beginning.

[Hester]

Madcat - I think the idea is that the image in the paragraph tag is a fallback incase the main image doesn't load. It's all in the new draft.