The W3C Kills XHTML in Favor of HTML 5!

File this one under its about frigging time!

The W3C has announced that it is dropping support for the XHTML 2 working group, in favor of HTML 5. Now, I'm a big fan of HTML5, but I don't see this as necessarily good news...

In the past, the W3C tried to dump HTML entirely in favor of XHTML... Here's an idea! You know all those web sites you just made? Well get ready to do it all over again... because with new and improved XHTML your rewritten pages will look and act exactly the same! Obviously, XHTML failed utterly to gain in popularity. Probably because the W3C is just plain awful at making specifications that are actually useful...

Not to be left out, the HTML faithful decided to create the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) to try to continue development... they were upset that HTML was neglected and stuck on version 4.01 since 1999! This group included folks from Apple, Mozilla, and Opera, with some help from Google. That working group came up with some great ideas and actual functioning technology, so the W3C finally caved and made a working group for HTML 5 back in 2007... Fast forward 2 years, and the W3C finally realizes that XHTML 2 was going nowhere, so it was time to ditch it in favor of HTML 5.

Now... part of me feels this is bad... because now that they can no longer ruin XHTML, the W3C can just focus all of its energies on ruining HTML. I'm also irked by the justifications the W3C put forward about dropping XHTML:

HTML and XHTML 2 working groups were formed by W3C in March 2007. "Basically, two years ago we chartered two working groups to work on similar things, and that created confusion in the marketplace," said Ian Jacobs, W3C representative.

Yeah, right... they were doing "similar things." Not even close, Ian. Allow me to translate: the W3C doesn't have a clue what people need the web to do, so we're going to allow Apple and Mozilla to figure it out for us, then we'll claim credit!

Classy...

Let's hope the good folks at WHATWG can see through this garbage, and don't let the W3C ruin HTML 5.