HTML5 is here courtesy of our friends from WHATWG. HTML 4.01 will have an officially sanctioned successor after all. For me, this indicates that XHTML 2.0 has no raison d’être now but who knows?
HTML5 has a bright future. And so has CSS and Javascript. I would advise all aspiring Computer Scientists to get familiar with the latter. Javascript is an extremely powerful programming language and will power the client-side portion of many of the applications we will use in the future.
I don’t really know a lot about HTML 5, but I just hope that it won’t have to ‘compete’ with XHTML 2. If some browsers (e.g. Firefox, Opera) decide to support HTML 5 and some others (e.g. IE) will only support XHTML 2, web developers have a big problem and will effectively be limited to using the intersection of both languages.
Also, I don’t really agree with the whole ‘XHTML is dead’-sentiment that I seem to find all over the web when searching for ‘HTML5’. Sure, XHTML was not supported greatly and it has some drawbacks, but with proper browser support and error handling, I would much prefer to use it over HTML. I don’t have a lot of experience, but the project I’m working on right now uses XML techniques quite liberally and it’s really powerful, so it would seem to me that XHTML should indeed have a future.
Also, about JavaScript:
I used to really hate it because of lack of tool support, obscure errors (it just won’t work) and browser incompatibilities, but after watching some of Douglas Crockford’s video lectures I really started to like a lot of aspects of the language.
I’m probably the only one who’s reading back your old programming blog entries (BTW I really like your blog), so I’m afraid nobody will read this, but I would really recommend these video lectures as an introduction to the greatness of JavaScript:
http://101out.com/js.php
By the way, I think there is also a JavaScript implementation for the server side (Rhino I think). Also, while reading back in your blog, I came across this post where Steve Yegge is talking about the Next Big Language, and he means JavaScript (he confirms this at the end of his keynote speech at OSCON 2007).
I guess HTML 4, HTML 5, XHTML 1 and XHTML 2 will all have to cohabit for some years at least…
JavaScript is really powerful. Douglas Crockford really knows how to advocate the language! I find the Prototype-based feature very intriguing.
Thanks for the info about Steve Yegge. I wasn’t aware that he (finally) revealed the secret about the NBL :-)
Thanks to read and comment on my blog.