What the hell is happening to XHTML? It seems only yesterday we were fighting to replace the sloppy and weakly-typed language of HTML to slowly enhance it with something more respectable, strict and well-structured such as XHTML.

Are we just giving up? Conceding to the fact that HTML is supposed to be an ugly, annoying language that is too trivial to put any decent effort into? Or are people starting to actually see the bigger picture nowadays and are just starting to pick their fights accordingly?

Social media madness, Web 2.0 fading, dragging, dropping and tweeting, pushing the boundaries of technology and allowing mainstream consumption of these technologies in intuitive, non-confusing manners seem to be the focus of 2007.

Can this still be done when all your time is consumed validating a piddly (X)HTML document? Or are their bigger issues we are just waking up to as industry still in it’s infancy and adjusting ourselves to take some bigger steps forward.

A few setbacks for XHTML I have noticed in the not so recent past:

Google Standards

Insanity, that’s all I can say that’s coming out of Google right now. Great ideas, a great environment and a bunch of talented people extremely passionate about what they are doing and given the green light to go ahead and just do it.

What about web standards, accessibility and general best practice development? There will be none of that in the Googleplex, thank you. Which kind of makes sense considering Google’s hiring policy. When is the last time you saw a front-end developer with a PhD?

Maturing Standardistas

The old school mentality of ‘validation or nothing’ is waning. Some of the A-listers have been quoted admitting that validation is not everything.

Usability, accessibility and information architecture are all about real users and can’t be quantified solely on the validation of an HTML document.

Mobile Web

Mobile browsers are plentiful, and so unpredictable that you would be delusional to think you could make your website look them same across all versions of these handsets. Embracing graceful degradation would be ideal heading into the future for mobile browsing.

Table-based layouts and inline HTML formatting seem to be the preferred method of development in the industry.

WHATWG

Real-world authoring, backwards compatibility and pragmatic development standards? Or just letting the industry slide and continue to be lazy and produce whatever proprietary standards they want for their own browsers?

Supported elements: <b>, :javascript protocol, and the late 90’s favourite, the <font> element. Oh dear.

Mainstream Standards

The large corporations are starting to pick up on the standards movement, or at now least have the smarts to hire those developers that are knowledgeable in this area.

Does this mean widespread web standards adoption? No, not really. It means a watered down, messy version of web standards that is compromised due to larger issues, business constraints and financial motivation.

This produces a less pedantic, bigger picture developer that realises the realities of developing web standards websites while balancing business goals with tight deadlines.

A very different game to the small design houses, personal blogs and CSS Zen Garden environments of a few years back.

The Fork in the Road

I used to be one of those pedantic, lower-case loving, zero-validation-error-smirking XHTML developers, but even other like-minded pedantic, XHTML developers have their own unique methods of achieving their own development goals.

HTML is too loose a language which breeds bad habits and a lack of process resulting in many developers all doing their own thing with no concern of sticking to strict XHTML type standards.

I always saw (and still see) XHTML as a step towards solving those problems and letting us move forward onto bigger, more complex problems than simple syntax errors and validation arguments.

There seems to be a fork in the road… I just can’t tell which direction XHTML is heading anymore.