Re: HTML 5 and XHTML 2 combined

Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis wrote:

> Consider the XML:
> 
> <img src="cat.jpg">A black cat playing with a ball of string</img>
> 
> If a browser implements the HTML5 spec, then that must be treated as an 
> image with missing alternative text. So a visual browser might either 
> display the cat photo or a missing image icon, while a screen reader 
> might ignore the image, read "image", or attempt to reconstruct 
> alternative text from the src attribute ("cat").
> 
> If a browser implements the XHTML2 spec, then that must be treated as a 
> cat photo with the alternative text "A black cat playing with a ball of 
> string".
> 
> Again, consider the XML::
> 
> <span href="http://www.w3.com">W3.com</span>
> 
> If a browser implements the HTML5 spec, that is just some text in a 
> SPAN. If a browser implements the XHTML2 spec, that is a hyperlink.
> 
> Since popular browsers seem more interested in implementing HTML5 than 
> XHTML2, 

which is a great shame, because the XML semantics appear (to the
current author) to be both far more intuitive and far more useful
than those of HTML5.

> this seems like a guarantee that they won't implement XHTML2, at 
> least not as a whole, unless the specs converge on such points.

Then let us hope that the benefits of the XML semantics are (or
become) obvious to all.

Philip TAYLOR