HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
“Practical use”
—New features should be added based on use cases.
Ideally, these should be based on real issues developers experience in
working around the limits of existing standards.
❂
“Scripting is here to stay”
—JavaScript had become something of a sec-
ond-class citizen in
XHTML
. Although the
WHATWG
preferred a
declarative markup approach, especially for the initial application
state, it recognized that scripting will always have a significant role.
❂
“Device-specific profiling should be avoided”
—The
W3C
produced a cut-
down version of the
XHTML
spec for mobile devices. The
WHATWG
felt that authors shouldn't have to produce different ver-
sions of their markup for different devices.
❂
“Open process”
—Although the
W3C
has open mailing lists, it also has
private ones.
WHATWG
activity is conducted entirely under public
scrutiny.
❂
This isn't to say the principles of the
WHATWG
were entirely orthogo-
nal to those being followed by the
W3C
's
XML
-focused working
groups, but there was a significant difference in approach. The
W3C
continued to work on
XHTML2
while the
WHATWG
worked on
HTML5
.
XHTML2
had the backing of the recognized standards body,
but it primarily appealed to people who wanted to use other
XML
-
based technologies.
HTML5
garnered far more popular support with
its “evolution rather than revolution” approach and its exhaustive doc-
umenting of browser behavior.
In addition to the seven principles, the
HTML5
spec took the step of
combining the separate
HTML
and
DOM
specs by the
W3C
. Experi-
ence had shown that trying to maintain them as two specifications led
to inconsistencies and incompatibilities. In the
HTML5
spec, the
DOM
became the basis of correct parsing—two implementations would be
interoperable if they produced the same
DOM
tree from an
HTML
document.
Eventually the W3C realized that it risked being made irrelevant by
real-world events. In March 2007, it relaunched the
HTML W
orking
Group. Mozilla, Apple, and Opera proposed that the
WHATWG
HTML5
specs be taken as the starting point of this new group's work,
