As the Web marches into the future, some developers say they're concerned about what will become of its past.
At stake are new specifications approved by the Web's leading standards body that would complete the transition from HTML to XML as the fundamental language used to build Web pages.
The changes, which affect an interim Web design language known as XHTML, were approved by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) last week amid a flurry of documents ranging from voice browsers to TV style sheets. The first, a second edition of XHTML 1.0, corrects errors in the published recommendation, while a working draft of XHTML 2.0 marks a significant departure from its predecessors.
Of primary concern to some Web developers is the W3C's warning that XHTML 2.0 will not be "backward compatible" with HTML 4.0 and XHTML 1.0. That alert has raised concern that billions of Web pages risk obsolescence unless they are translated to the new Web language.
Most see any significant clash between the old and new languages as a long way off. But some developers say the lack of compatibility will immediately hold them back from switching to XHTML 2.0, a reluctance that could potentially complicate what many see as a necessary evolution for the Web.
"I'm really hesitant over the line in the new spec (v2) that reads, 'While the ancestry of XHTML 2 comes from HTML 4, XHTML 1.0, and XHTML 1.1, it is not intended to be backward compatible with its earlier versions,'" Frances Currit-Dhaseleer, a technical trainer and Webmaster in Colorado Springs, Colorado, wrote in an email interview. "What exactly does this mean? Does this mean that everything else is obsolete? If that's the case, it'll be a long time before I move over to XHTML."
XHTML, first recommended by the W3C in January 2000, attempted to redesign the Web's standard mark-up language from HTML, which was increasingly considered a jerry-built, relatively unstructured improvisation on an existing computer mark-up language called the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML).
The W3C's goal was to start translating the Web into Extensible Markup Language, or XML, a highly flexible but also tightly structured technology that lets developers create task- or industry-specific markup languages while cracking down on basic syntactical rules that HTML left open-ended.
The trouble with HTML's permissiveness was that Web browsers were required to make assumptions about Web authors' intentions, leading to bloated code.
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