Being Mr. Kenny

I wasn’t actually going to post about this for a number of reasons, mainly because it bears the possibility of being boring, but I recently came across the Working Draft for XHTML 2 and I find it very interesting. If you haven’t heard about the planned changes, you might like to take a peek (if you’re an XHTML fanatic like me).

(XHTML is the language we use to make web pages. Right click on this page and click on “View source”: What you see is XHTML. And it’s very pretty and wonderful.)

XHTML 2 is going to be the biggest update to HTML/XHTML for a very long time. Currently, the latest version of XHTML is 1.1, but with XHTML 2 there will be a plethora of new elements and attributes.

Among the biggest updates is the ability to apply href="" to any element. Therefore you can use something like <address href="mailto:beingmrkenny@gmail.com">Email me</address> to specify links to your email address, or even, and this is more complicated:

<p>My favourite pages:</p>

<ul>
 <li href="http://beingmrkenny.co.uk/">
   Being Mr Kenny
 </li>
 <li href="http://open-space.org.uk/">
   Open Space
 </li>
</ul>

Notice there’s no <a href=""> in there.

Also to be added is <blockcode> to be used in place of <pre><code> combinations, <nl> for navigational lists (to replace things like <ul id="nav">).

There’s loads of other updates, but I think I’m waffling a bit about stuff only a few people will be interested in. Investigate them for yourself at http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/. It’s very exciting :D

Update: There’s a more detailed list available in the draft: http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/…

Update 2: Something about images: http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/2004/xhtml-faq#img