<xml.lt>

Some time ago I was wondering what the future of XHTML 2 and HTML 5 is going to be. Now it seems to be clear: W3C announces end of work on XHTML 2, and hopes to accelerate work on HTML 5.

It's good to have it finally sorted out, and HTML 5 seems to bring some long awaited features. However, one thing about it worries me a lot, and it's the syntax. The specification now defines two variants of them: HTML 5 (old-school HTML style, with no closing tags) and XHTML 5 (XML serialization, with namespaces etc.).

Years have been spent on developer education and improving XML support in browsers and parsers, and HTML 5 seems to make them useless again and bring even more confusion. Even though W3C promises XML serialization of HTML to remain compatible with XML (I hope there were no plans to change that, at least?) we still will have 2 syntaxes and 2 sets of tools to process them, and once beggining to seem possible, convergence to a single XML serialization will be as far away as 10 years ago.

HTML is not easier to parse than XHTML, supported basically on the same level, has no extension mechanism (like namespaces), and is arguably less logical to write (when is there a closing tag, and when not?). So why the nonsense?