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by wahern 1426 days ago
I was curious so I compared the list of element tags between HTML 4.0 and XHTML 2.0, excluding the XForms module. Excluding XForms tags from XHTML 2.0, the former has 91 tags, reduced to 67 in the latter.

XHTML 2.0 removed 42 tags: acronym, applet, area, b, base, basefont, bdo, big, button, center, dir, fieldset, font, form, frame, frameset, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, iframe, input, isindex, label, legend, map, menu, noframes, noscript, optgroup, option, s, select, small, strike, textarea, tt, u.

XHTML 2.0 added 18 tags: access, action, addEventListener, blockcode, di, dispatchEvent, heading, l, legacyheadings, listener, preventDefault, removeEventListener, ruby, section, separator, standby, stopPropagation, summary,

AFAICT, XHTML 2.0 reorganized tags into modules, yes, but didn't actually try to expand the set of semantic tags, except for XForms--the XForms module looks really complex. And those module groupings were more concerned with functionality, not content semantics, per se.

FWIW, here are the XForms 2.0 tags: action, delete, dispatch, group, input, insert, load, message, model, output, range, rebuild, recalculate, refresh, repeat, reset, revalidate, secret, select1, select, send, setfocus, setindex, setvalue, submit, switch, textarea, trigger, upload

By contrast, HTML5 looks to have added more semantic tags, and more incoherently. HTML5 has 111 elements (excluding math and svg).

HTML5 removed 14 tags: acronym, applet, basefont, big, center, dir, font, frame, frameset, isindex, noframes, param, strike, tt

HTML5 added 34 tags: article, aside, audio, bdi, canvas, data, datalist, details, dialog, embed, figcaption, figure, footer, header, hgroup, main, mark, meter, nav, output, picture, progress, rp, rt, ruby, section, slot, source, summary, template, time, track, video, wbr

Source: https://www.w3.org/TR/html4/index/elements.html, https://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/elements.html, https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/indices.html#elements...

1 comments

As far as I recall, that "final" draft of the XHTML 2.0 that W3 posted is "post-schism" just to get something out to compete with the growing momentum of HTML5 and kick the semantic can down the road again to XHTML 3.0 (after most of the damage of the schism was already done). I recall early XHTML 2 drafts had at least article, aside, section, hgroup, and others. I don't know where you would track down such drafts other than combing ancient mailing list archives.