Last year saw the battle between HD-DVD and Blu-ray, crushed partly by a bit of ingenuity on the part of manufacturers who are building in support for both formats into their latest models.
But times they are still a-changin’, and the next few years could see interesting times for the Web as HTML 5 and XHTML 2 do battle.
In the red corner, WHATWG’s offering: HTML 5. Before XHTML took hold, HTML 4 was pretty much the standard, and some would argue the only one needed (some suggesting that XHTML 1.0 offers no advantages). Because it builds on the code base of its predecessor, HTML 5 is fully backwards-compatible with 4, and offers some useful new features. It’s supported by the major browser developers, except (of course) for Microsoft.
In the blue corner wearing the W3C shorts, XHTML 2. This offers some very interesting improvements, and a real change in the way developers think about content online. XHTML and CSS have become big buzzwords, and this standard is seen as the “cleanest” and most sensible. The major problem with XHTML 2 is that it is not backwards-compatible with its predecessor, and that because it offers many new features, these cannot be used in good conscience until all major browser platforms are able to support them...so almost never.
As I’ve already mentioned, Microsoft’s complete absence from this debate raises serious questions. The simple fact is, unless Microsoft gets behind one (or both) of these standards, this argument is purely academic. The Microsoft and Mozilla code bases are the only two that matter, and let’s face it, the Internet won’t collapse if Firefox is unable to accurately reproduce newer web pages, whereas if developers get behind a standard that is unsupported by Microsoft, over 80% of web users could be stuck in 2007. This eventuality is unlikely of course, but the simple fact is that the Web can’t move forward before the Microsoft troll hiding under the bridge gives it the nod.