Interesting read. To be honest I didn't think anyone was working on HTML any longer, I figured any more advances will be in things like CSS, XML and JavaScript, it's good to see that that's not the case. I do agree however with some of the comments below the article - a more pressing issue right now is browser compliance. I'm tired of having to design websites for two or three browsers. IE7 was suppose to resolve that issue to a large extent, but other than native PNG support I still find myself having to use all the same old tricks to make sure that pages look similar on IE7 and FF, and note how I say similar, because other than in very limited cases it's almost impossible to make them look identical, unless the whole page is flash.

FF2 isn't exactly perfect either. It was suppose to be 100% CSS2 compliant - but it's not, and while generally better off than IE7 there are still some oddities that crop up here and there - like the "background-color" area behind linked images.

Why is it so hard for them to make 100% compatible browsers

Why can't they just combine elements from XML and Html and make browsers to accept the same code langs i wonder...What is CSS2 btw? I'm a bit behind, i use plain CSS for the moment.

PS: Em i think you have something wrong in thread title, i think it's W3C.

That's XHTML.


The second version of CSS. And what do you mean by "plain CSS"?


That is correct.



I read somewhere, that someone was working on an HTML 5 standard. It wasn't the W3C doing it. And the HTML5 the spoke of there wasn't XHTML, it was another version of HTML markup. None of the XML rules. Trying to find the link, but I think it'd on my other comp...

I disagree. I find it fairly easy to make it all identical across browsers. Of course, I use a cross use of CSS and HTML. Although CSS is said to completely eliminate HTML, I find that a combination is best.

If your very specific about what you want, everything tends to mesh well. The latest problem I had was actually with Firefox, where it wouldn't accept one of the marquee options for my matrix look (and I didn't want to use Javascript for those who didn't allow it). Getting my multiple sound media player to work also posed a few challenges.

Some new standards would be nice... But it's like in 4 years?!? The final days of 2010? Ugh, that's quite a ways away... but I guess it'll come quickly.

CSS is not suppose to eliminate HTML. They are two very different things.
HTML defines the structure of the document, while CSS defines the layout. It's just that back in the 90's people started to add sorts of non-structural elements to HTML.
And I'd strongly suggest that you switch to complete separation of HTML and CSS because it's much easier to maintain in the long run. And more importantly, when you create sites for accessibility, print, mobiles etc, you don't want the HTML to interfere with any of the layout. Loads of more reasons, but I'm already getting a bit off topic.


Yes, it's not impossible at all. But then again, you don't really want to make a pixel identical website anyway. The best website is a website that degrades gracefully according to browser capabilities.


Has to be adopted by a great number of people and browsers supporting it. Look at CSS 2.1, still a working draft after all these years it's been a proposial and people using it.

Oups...honest typo...



Well nothing much, it's just CSS 1.0.



True...this works very good. CSS for layout elements and HTML for everything else. But that's for small/personal sites. Not big sites IMO.

No, I meant: combination of HTML and XML as you proposed is XHTML.


You mean that big sites don't benefit from layer separation? It's big sites that should use that and will benefit the most.

This site uses CSS.

Hmm...haven't designed any big sites, but i think it would be difficult. Dunno though...maybe you have more experience with these things.

A big website with many pages will benefit from layer separation so that it's easier to manage it. If you have 50 pages, or more even, you don't want to iterate through each page to update your layout. That's why you put everything into one external CSS file.
And if you have a big site you most likely want to make your content accessible to as big an audience as possible. So you want to cater for normal web browsers, people with accessibility problems, mobile phone access perhaps (the web isn't just for computers any more. even TVs access the internet) and you might want to provide a customized print layout to match your company profile and remove any element not related to the content such as the navigational links etc.
If you where to do this with the layout defined inside you HTML then you'd have to create a page for each of these scenarios. Something which will cause more time to be spent and as well as bandwidth.
If you separate the layout from the content completely all you need is one HTML file for each page and a set of CSS files which the browser will choose from according to it's needs. Screen readers will load your aural CSS file, moble devices will load CSS designed specificity for small screens and when you print you get the special print layout.
You have then removed the need for multiple pages for the same content, whilst modularise your design into smaller manage pieces. Additionally the CSS files will be cached normally by the user agents so you will save even more bandwidth.

Separating layout from content, as well as behaviour (javascript) isn't any harder that old tag soup. It's just different. But it's benefit hugely outweighs not using it. Particularly as the site grows.

Oh i see now. Thank you for that enlighting perspective of things.