Just saw in my mailbox that some of my mails were, incorrectly, marked as spam. The content of some of those lead me to discussions about HTML5 and XHTML 2. See the thread here called: XHTML 2 Working Group won’t be renewed?, that started with the remark “I was very surprised by this announcement: http://www.w3.org/News/2009#item119“.
Most of the discussions sound very familiar. Its all about design, distributed development and integration. Things were are used to in our relational database environments and multitier environments.
And, as you saw reflected in the title, I really liked this one:
The problem that XHTML 2.0 faced (and any XHTML adoption for that matter) is that you’re still dealing with the Coding Granny Argument, something that is used extensively by the HTML purist crowd who frankly do NOT want to see XML adopted as a lingua franca, especially for expressing HTML.
Most of you have seen the argument, of course. It runs along the lines of “HTML has to be accessible to non-programmers. My grandmother should be able to write HTML code, even if its ill-formed, and have the browser magically “know” what was the intent of such code, otherwise there will be no adoption of HTML.
In practice, this argument is specious in the extreme. The eponymous coding granny is far more likely to be writing in a blog engine or wiki in which the input of content is almost certainly going to be filtered into a final form for storage, they will likely end up using perhaps two tags, <i> and <b>, and may even by using a WYSIWYG editor that will let her incorporate code programatically. It is not, in fact, this user that the argument is intended to protect, but rather the coder with bad programming habits.
and a bit further on