[racket-dev] Web language

On Tue, Oct 26, 2010 at 10:29 AM, Eli Barzilay <eli at barzilay.org> wrote:
> 5 minutes ago, Sam Tobin-Hochstadt wrote:
>> On Tue, Oct 26, 2010 at 10:01 AM, Eli Barzilay <eli at barzilay.org> wrote:
>> >
>> > OK, I changed it -- but here are some of the points that made me
>> > think that `html' is the right choice:
>>
>> Here's one more (and IMHO more significant) point: XHTML is on the
>> way out as a web technology.  In particular, HTML5 is treating the
>> whole HTML-in-XML idea as mostly failed and continuing without
>> paying it much attention.  For more details, see:
>>   http://dev.w3.org/html5/html4-differences/#syntax
>> and
>>   http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/HTML_vs._XHTML
>
> [Wait -- you mean that xhtml is the following standard to html4, but
> then the even newer html5 dumps all that work and re-starts from html4
> with artificial compatibility to xhmlt??  What kind of twisted
> standard does that make??]

Roughly, XHTML = HTML4 in XML syntax, and then the XHTML people wanted
to evolve in a direction that no one on the web actually wanted, and
got lost in standards-ese.  The browser vendors then started a new
standards effort, which does a lot of things, including dumping the
idea of errors for invalid documents in favor of specifying error
behavior.  That's HTML5.  As a sop to people who care about
HTML-in-XML-syntax, they've defined an encoding in XML syntax, but the
people who run HTML5 don't care.  Lots more history is available here
(from the HTML5 perspective):

  http://diveintohtml5.org/past.html

Everyone should read this as a history-of-technology and the perils
(and importance) of standards.

> In any case, that sounds like it will be desirable to move it back to
> `html' in the not-so-far future, and then renaming the new collection
> will make even less sense.  Sounds like I should go back to `html'
> then.

If you're planning to serve things under the text/html mime type
(which racket-lang.org currently does, for example) then it should
definitely be called `html'.
-- 
sam th
samth at ccs.neu.edu