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by redwall_hp 301 days ago
The W3C spec was. But WHATWG and HTML5 represent a coup by the dominant browser corporations (read: Google). The biggest browser dictates the "living standard" and the W3C is forced into a descriptivist role.

The W3C's plan was for HTML4 to be replaced by XHTML. What we commonly call HTML5 is the WHATWG "HTML Living Standard."
1 comments
arccy 301 days ago
the old sages in ivory towers handed us a spec engraved in stone and expected is to live by it

no wonder they were sidelined

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WorldMaker 301 days ago
They weren't sidelined because they had bad ideas (XHTML 2.0 had a lot of great ideas, many of which HTML5 eventually "borrowed"), they were sidelined because they still saw the web as primarily a document platform and Google especially was trying to push it as a larger application platform. It wasn't a battle between the ivory tower and practical concerns, it was a proxy battle in the general war between the web as a place optimized to link between meaningful, accessibility-first documents and the web as a place to host generalized applications with accessibility often an afterthought. (ARIA is great, but ARIA can only do so much, not as much of it by default/a pit of success as XHTML 2.0 once hoped to be.)
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