Rules are meant to be broken they say, and when it comes to web standards it appears that the same holds true. XML was set to be everywhere, even influencing one of the web's pillars, HTML, in favor of XHTML. And then HTML has been revived as HTML 5. What does this mean?
First of all, what am I talking about? What is HTML. HTML, Hypertext Markup Language, is the predominant markup language for the building of web pages. It provides a means to describe the structure of text-based information in a document and to supplement that text with interactive forms, embedded images, and other objects. If what you need to build a website is not provided by HTML, then you can embed the tools necessary into the HTML in order to perform what is needed. Adobe's FLASH is a perfect example of this. FLASH provides a technology that HTML could never duplicate, and yet HTML provides a placeholder for FLASH. This is why HTML is THE standard for the construction of websites.
A Little History
HTML started out in July of 1993 as a working draft for the sharing of documents across the preWEB internet. IN November of 1995 HTML 2 was born allowing for the inclusion of images, tables language control. Then in January of 1997 the W3C, World Wide Web Consortium http://w3c.org/, made their recommendation that HTML 3.2 become the standard. By December of that year HTML 4 was born and the Internet had what was needed to produce the websites that we are familiar with today.
There were problems developing however. HTML, although the standard, was not used in a standardized manner. To make matters worse, the browsers needed to view the websites, Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Netscape's Navigator were the most popular of the time, offered their own versions of HTML options. This issue was compounded further with each browser providing their own fixes for displaying the more common mistakes made in the HTML of websites. The result was more inconsistency. What was to be done to remedy this?
The W3C saw the best option in uniting the web developers and the browser developers was to create a new standard. In January of 2000 XHTML was born. This new standard worked almost identically to HTML and yet offered many news advances. Of note was the inclusion of XML which provided the ability to use external style sheet, Scalable Vector Graphics and RDFs to name but a few. Also added was the XML thought process that if the code was malformed then an error is displayed and everything comes to a halt. This would require the website developers to build a site properly with no more mistakes being inconsistently rendered by the browsers. This sounded good.
You can guess the outcome. Web developers continued producing bad code and the browsers continued displaying the websites as they saw fit and correcting the common code issues in their own way. Now we had another standard to work with and more issues.
Today, HTML5
In August 2007 the W3C released their HTML validator for the newly released HTML 5.0 and a new standard was born. HTML 5 offers the advantages of XHTML while still retaining compatibility with XHTML and HTML 3.2 - 4.01. More importantly though is a new way of standardizing the way malformed code is executed. Sounds great; all of the current standards rolled into one and a way to deal with the browsers rendering bad code.
Time will tell whether this new revision is capable of uniting the website developers of the world, and the browser developers that make viewing the Internets content possible. What I see is yet another new standard to confuse us with and more good ideas that have no follow through by the developers of the world. No matter, the team I work with is striving to meet HTML 5 with 100% dedication. We are going through all of the websites that we control and updating them to the new standard. Here is hoping the payoff will be what is promised.
