html5 is more compatible than other doctypes, it’s cooler and more fancy? Geez, that’s no wonder if the doctype pushes almost any known browsers back to the so-much-avoided quircks mode.

Call me a nerd, but didn’t we nag at the doors of Microsoft and Netscape for years so they would make their browsers “standards compliant” instead of rendering their quirks mode? And now, after years and years of development, discussion and a bunch of working groups we get more tags and a thingy we once told that would kill our pages over time?

Bah, I used xhtml1.1 and hoped xhtml2.0 would strip more tags, adher more to the “stick to the minimal basics while opening up in an xml way” and last but not least draw a big, fat line between those who just “whip up a quick, invalid website” and those who “know their code”.

My 2 cents are: this whole html2.0 to html5 evolution is a round trip, taking us back to 1996. But telling us it’s the invention of the wheel. Right… and in 2 or 3 years the W3C will say that blinking text is the newest thing and therefore a good idea or what?

Have all those people that plugged out of their BBS and into the WWW forgotten about the past, or have they just retired?

On the other hand… somehow I like the fact that it is “more compatible”. It saves me from needing to adher to useless stuff and it sure saves me from whipping up my own doctype one day.

If it were up to me, a document would have a HTML tag, a HEAD with contained TITLE, the well known BODYtag and just 9 main tags to be used: H1, H2, H3, P, UL, OL, A, DIV and SPAN. Ok, those forms and tables would throw in a few more, but I don’t need a fancy doctype offering over 100 tags to push text to the screen in a useable and nice-looking way.

And think about this one: neiter the pages of Google, nor Bing do validate in any mode whatsoever. If that is what search-engines produce… why stick to standards anyway? Those companies (Google Inc. and Microsoft Inc.) are big enough to buy the planet… if they don’t produce valid code, why should we?

And what about the “plugins are now replaced by embedded rendering alternatives” thingy? Cool, all that means is that the W3C is killing business for companies that digged their cash in the plugin market. Good thing that Macromedia didn’t live long enough to see that happen… now it’s a problem for Adobe, but they cash-in more on their flagships like Photoshop.

Furthermore: stuff like “video” and “canvas”? Makes me think of Netscape’s blinking text idea again! Remember that HTML = Hypertext, not Hypervideo or Hyperanimation. It’s not even Hypercool… it’s text, just a bit smarter. But hey, who am I to judge?

In the end we all have to ask ourselves a totally different question: what do we need the W3C working groups for anyway if web evolution means “going forward into the past” to them? They could as well have simply added a few tags to html 2.0 and bingo…

Argh! Just realised this is just a simple comment box and not a place to post a book. I Hope I didn’t kill your nerves for spitting out what my braincells produced and I sure hope I don’t get hunted down and shot for this comment, but when I start agreeing with Zeldman, the world is getting out of order! ;)

I have to agree that learning and using XHTML is far from being redundant, especially for people who are beginning in web design and development. I feel that strict rules provide a much simpler framework for learning than “loose rules with multiple shortcuts”.