So I was reading over the W3C Working Draft for XHTML 2.0.  I must say, I’m looking forward to it so far (that is, when it’ll be most-used standard).  The W3C has already stated that it will not be 100% backwards compatible with previous standards (XHTML 1.0 and HTML 4.0) however any current author should understand it with no problem.  Everything I’ve seen so far that is new is very self explanatory and takes care of some current issues in web development.

One thing is the W3C has been urging people to use the heading tags to section off web pages (with the heading tags showing levels of importance/precedence).  However they’ve not seen it happening as often as they’d like (I know I personally don’t bother with heading tags too often).  So they’re introducing the section element.  The purpose being to install somewhat of a hierarchy within your web page to denote what is most important and what’s least important.

A big one is the shift from using the br element to the new l element.  The new l element will explicitly define new lines instead of having to force break them with the often-times-flawed br.

Another improvement is they’re expanding the purpose of the p element.  In current XHTML 1.0 you cannot lists and tables within the paragraph.  Personally that has been a huge hindrance to me.  In XHTML 2.0 that will no longer be a problem; the likes of lists and tables will be allowed within paragraphs.

The anchor element (a) will be unnecessary as the href attribute can be applied to any element.  Thus an entire list entry could be a link doing this:

<li href=”http://google.com”>Google</li>

The last update I’ll mention is the new XFORMS technology that is replacing the current fashion of handling forms in a document.  W3C refers to XFORMS as an overhaul… I’d go as far as to say it’s more than that.  I’ll be making another post soon to explain more about XFORMS, as the potential behind it is amazing.

So I’ll end this entry with a simple question: If you’ve been keeping up with XHTML 2.0 what are your personal thoughts?  And if you haven’t been keeping up with it, but read this entry: How do you feel about these, in some cases drastic, changes?