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⟶ CISD and DCI ⟶ Literature ⟶ W3C UK News (1998-2006)
⟶ CISD and DCI ⟶ Literature ⟶ W3C UK News (1998-2006)
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1998
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Issue 16: April 1999

XHTML: The New HTML

by Steven Pemberton (CWI)

In February 1998, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an international industry consortium with more than 300 members, issued the definition of XML, a subset of the meta-language SGML, the language that had originally been used to define HTML.

SGML is a difficult language to fully implement, and so the goal of XML is to enable generic SGML to be served, received, and processed on the Web in the way that is now possible with HTML. XML has been designed for ease of implementation and for interoperability with both SGML and HTML.

For some time HTML had been growing by accretion of elements added by different vendors which had caused problems with interoperability between browsers, since browsers had to be updated to accept the new elements, and this didn't always happen.

XML allows you to define and use your own HTML-like languages with fewer interoperability problems. The earlier release of the first Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) definition in 1996 means that you can also easily define how your new language should appear on the screen.

Now you can serve documents like this:

<address>
  <name>Steven Pemberton</name>
  <company>CWI</company>
  <street>Kruislaan 413</street>
  <postcode>1098 SJ</postcode>
  <city>Amsterdam</city>
 </address>

with several different style sheets for different presentation styles.

So the question arises, if you can now define your own languages in an interoperable way, is there still a need for HTML?

It was with this question that we organised an international workshop in May 1998 in San Francisco. The consensus of the attendees was that there was a need for a new version of HTML, for several reasons:

So the W3C HTML Working Group was reformed with a mission to develop the next generation of HTML as a suite of XML tag sets with a clean migration path from HTML 4.0. Some of the expected benefits include: reduced authoring costs, an improved match to database & workflow applications, a modular solution to the increasingly disparate capabilities of browsers, and the ability to cleanly integrate HTML with other XML applications.

Recently a public working draft of the first version of the new HTML, which now carries the (trade-marked) name XHTML, was released. This version is just the migrated version of HTML 4.0; the tasks of modularising, profiling (subsetting and extending), and defining new forms are parallel ongoing work items.

Migrating HTML from SGML to XML meant making some decisions because of differences between the two meta-languages. One of these is that XML is case-sensitive, where (old) HTML was not: this means that elements in XHTML must be written in lower case. Other XML differences mean that all elements must now be closed, such as using <li> ...</li> for list items, and <p>...</p> for paragraphs, and empty elements must be written specially, such as <br/> and <hr/> instead of <br> and <hr>.

Despite these differences, it is still possible, by following a few authoring guidelines, to create documents that are compatible with most old-HTML browsers, giving the advantage of a smooth changeover from SGML-based to XML-based browsers. New generations of XML-enabled browsers, such as Microsoft Internet Explorer 5, and Netscape 5 are now beginning to emerge.

The expectation is that XHTML 1.0 will become a W3C Recommendation shortly; modularisation, profiling, and new forms will then follow later in the year. For further information see:

http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-html-in-xml/
http://www.w3.org/Markup/

Steven Pemberton is a researcher at the CWI, and chair of the W3C HTML Working Group.

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines

On 24 March 1999, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines were released as a Proposed Recommendation. This was followed by a Techniques document in April that introduces some general techniques for promoting accessibility and also gives details of how to enhance accessibility when using CSS, HTML and XML.

An example is that for alternative text associated with images you should imagine reading the document aloud over the telephone. What would you say upon encountering this image to make the page comprehensible to the listener? The Guidelines and Techniques can be found at:

http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/WAI-WEBCONTENT-19990324/
http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/WAI-WEBCONTENT-TECHS-19990412/

The Web Hits Toronto in May

The next Advisory Committee Meeting of W3C is due to take place in Toronto immediately before WWW8 on 10-11 May, 1999. The highlighted topics include the new Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, Graphics, New Devices on the Web (TV and Mobile) and the status of RDF.

The Eighth World Wide Web Conference is taking place at the Toronto Convention Centre from 11-14 May, 1999. Tim Berners-Lee, Bob Metcalfe, Greg Papadopoulos and John Patrick are the Key Note Speakers.

The Tutorials cover a wide range of topics including XML, RDF, Styling, SMIL, Electronic Payment Systems, Security, Internationalization etc.

Developers Day on 14 May has 8 separate tracks covering topics like Scalable Graphics, Web Scripting, XML and the DOM, Databases, StyleSheets and Accessibility.

New Members

The total number of members has risen to 322 with a breakdown:

Full Affiliate
Americas 42 144
Europe 28 66
Asia-Oceania 17 25

The new Members since March are:

The W3C-LA Project Completing

The Esprit Leveraging Action, W3C-LA, that brings you this Newsletter is completing. The official closure was to have been 4th February 1999 but there has been an extension until April to finish off some of the technical work.

The plan is to continue producing this Newsletter monthly as part of the European Offices activities. This is the second issue to be distributed electronically. In the UK, we plan to e-mail existing recipients of the Newsletter a notification when each issue is available on the Web. If you would like to take advantage of this service, we would appreciate you sending an email to: w3c-ral@inf.rl.ac.uk.

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