> I'd say the W3C wasted a huge amount of time pursuing quests of purity (XHTML) over actually making the web better for users. I see the value in what they were trying to do, but it wasn't letting people do the things they wanted to do on the web.
Okay, let’s make a deal:
We both write a crawler that can fully reliably parse websites.
I implement XHTML1.1, you implement HTML5. We both get 1 month time.
What do you think is going to happen?
XHTML was a worthy goal – with it, we wouldn’t have a need to run headless Chrome for tests. We could parse the web, and actually use the data. OpenGraph tags would never have been necessary. We wouldn’t need to throw DNNs at rendered output of a browser just to parse data.
HTML5 is amazing for existing browser vendors, developers, and in the short-term, users. But everyone else loses. Horribly.
Okay, let’s make a deal:
We both write a crawler that can fully reliably parse websites.
I implement XHTML1.1, you implement HTML5. We both get 1 month time.
What do you think is going to happen?
XHTML was a worthy goal – with it, we wouldn’t have a need to run headless Chrome for tests. We could parse the web, and actually use the data. OpenGraph tags would never have been necessary. We wouldn’t need to throw DNNs at rendered output of a browser just to parse data.
HTML5 is amazing for existing browser vendors, developers, and in the short-term, users. But everyone else loses. Horribly.