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XHTML documents have exactly the same semantics as HTML. Neither is more semantically sound than the other. XHTML just defined a slightly different syntax whic

by goto11 7y ago

XHTML documents have exactly the same semantics as HTML. Neither is more semantically sound than the other. XHTML just defined a slightly different syntax which was XML compatible. This was useful if you were using XML tools, but it didn't affect semantics at all.

WorldMaker 7y ago
XHTML 2.0 was very different from HTML semantically. Some of its tags (ARTICLE, SECTION, MENU, etc) wound up smashed into HTML5 later and became semantically meaningless again, but XHTML 2.0 tried to be more semantically sound than HTML and is a large part of how W3C lost the war to HTML5, because semantics are hard and most of the browsers didn't care about semantics.
- goto11 7y ago
  Why to you consider the XHTML 2.0 elements more "semantically sound" than the equivalent HTML5 elements?
  - WorldMaker 7y ago
    A reason XHTML 2.0 got so bogged down in committee and never actually finished a standard was that the attempt was made to define semantically what an ARTICLE would be, how SECTIONS work, what things a browser or semantic web crawler could infer/summarize build from such things. For instance, one group of the committee argued you couldn't have SECTIONs outside of an ARTICLE; that an ARTICLE consisted of zero or more SECTIONs (and maybe SECTIONs could be nested inside of each other). Folks argued for SECTIONs to have concepts of names that could be listed in auto-generated Tables of Contents. HTML5 mostly just defines ARTICLE and SECTION as optional block-level content elements, with no other real importance. This leaves them as merely fancier synonyms for DIV. Semantics is almost entirely left to ARIA, and while HTML5 has come back around to ARTICLE tag should imply, for instance, ARIA role="article", there's still a bunch of interesting reasons that people concerned with ARIA semantics continue to write "redundant" things like <ARTICLE aria-role="article"...

by goto11 7y ago

WorldMaker 7y ago

XHTML 2.0 was very different from HTML semantically. Some of its tags (ARTICLE, SECTION, MENU, etc) wound up smashed into HTML5 later and became semantically meaningless again, but XHTML 2.0 tried to be more semantically sound than HTML and is a large part of how W3C lost the war to HTML5, because semantics are hard and most of the browsers didn't care about semantics.

goto11 7y ago
Why to you consider the XHTML 2.0 elements more "semantically sound" than the equivalent HTML5 elements?
- WorldMaker 7y ago
  A reason XHTML 2.0 got so bogged down in committee and never actually finished a standard was that the attempt was made to define semantically what an ARTICLE would be, how SECTIONS work, what things a browser or semantic web crawler could infer/summarize build from such things. For instance, one group of the committee argued you couldn't have SECTIONs outside of an ARTICLE; that an ARTICLE consisted of zero or more SECTIONs (and maybe SECTIONs could be nested inside of each other). Folks argued for SECTIONs to have concepts of names that could be listed in auto-generated Tables of Contents. HTML5 mostly just defines ARTICLE and SECTION as optional block-level content elements, with no other real importance. This leaves them as merely fancier synonyms for DIV. Semantics is almost entirely left to ARIA, and while HTML5 has come back around to ARTICLE tag should imply, for instance, ARIA role="article", there's still a bunch of interesting reasons that people concerned with ARIA semantics continue to write "redundant" things like <ARTICLE aria-role="article"...