August 19, 2002
Getting bent over backwards (compatibility).
I’ve been aware that the W3C was cooking up a new edition of the XHTML recommendation for some time now, but I wasn’t entirely clear on the extent of the backwards compatibility issues brought up by this article on ZDNet. I’m assuming that the bulk of the problems being chatted about in the article could be handled with a properly declared doctype and the ability for a modern browser to differentiate between versions of markup, right? The mention of this draft publication was touched on by friend Jeffery as well as the Web Standards Project, but only just. It’s probably too soon to start getting all worked up about this, but information delivered early and incomplete is often preferable to getting a pile of unexpected unpleasantries dumped on your head later. So let me voice this one question… is the major issue here that fact that many of the old, clunky markup crutches will be deprecated in this version of XHTML? It would be nice to know in advance, I suppose. Of course, the current working draft is a bit thin on details in the old documentation department. What am I missing, if anything?
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