Not that anyone cares what I think, but I had a lot of the same thoughts as Ian Hickson and Dorothea Salo when I read the first draft XHTML 2.0 specification a few months ago. Eric Meyer is broadly sympathetic
with several of its detractors (and I’ve seen even more), but points out that you can use XSLT to bridge the gap between old browsers and new ones
. In fact, that’s just what Sjoerd Visscher did five months ago, after showing that current browsers can already deal with a lot of XHTML2 through stylesheets and binding technologies like HTCs or XBL
.
Right now XHTML2 is a science experiment, just like publishing a weblog in RSS with embedded HTML (instead of the other way around, published as a separate page). It’s changeable, and changing; it’s been in the works already for more than two years, and will be for at least two more.
Ian points out, correctly, that [the] fact that xHTML2 won’t be widely used before the end of the decade is not a problem. For some reason, the Internet populous has this strange idea that if something isn’t adopted overnight, it must be a failure.
Perhaps eventually I’ll think it’s a pain in the ass with no demonstrable benefit (NB: I realize that’s a comment on XHTML 1.1, not XHTML 2). But for now I haven’t made up my mind.
