These are the tags
That live in the house
The house of confusion
That Jeffrey built.

This is the house [dive into mark]

It’s notable that in the wake of the Death of XHTML, some number of people are pointing fingers toward Jeffrey Zeldman, the writer, web standards educator and evangelist who, with his book ‘Designing for Web Standards’, provided the spark that pushed ‘XHTML’ as ‘new HTML’.

This seems harsh.

Zeldman, in writing that book, made a call based on best available knowledge that XHTML was the future. At the time, it looked that way. Turned out not to be. But as all pragmatists know, whether you use XHTML or HTML4 makes not the blindest difference. Never has. So, it doesn’t matter that someone made the wrong prediction about the future.

I don’t mean indifference in a smug ‘it’s all parsed as HTML really’ way, I just mean that in reality, bar a /> here and there, it’s really the same language.

What Zeldman and those that followed him achieved by evangelising XHTML over HTML4 has different value; a clear distinction between old, broken coding practices and the clean, accessible CSS-driven present. Yes, all that they preached could be achieved exactly the same by using HTML4 properly, but that’s not the point; people weren’t using HTML4 properly.

Some refer to this choice to evangelise XHTML as a ‘marketing tool’, an expression that seems intended to accusatively finger the book authors and conference speakers that stood up for XHTML at that time.

I instead refer to it as an ‘education tool’. This was about teaching, not branding.

I firmly believe that people responded to the Web Standards movement with more enthusiasm and positivity because of XHTML. They came to it learning and teaching something new and better, not being taught that everyone was just doing it wrong.

Did XHTML get pushed in too absolute terms? Yes. Did properly-written HTML4 get libelled as ‘tag soup’? Yes. Would it be better if that hadn’t happened? Sure.

But would ‘Write better HTML’ have had anything like the educational impact of ‘Learn new XHTML’? Not a chance. Would coding standards, accessibility and the spread of structured data on the web be as successful as they are today without the XHTML education? I say no.

So HTML5 is the real deal, but authors can continue setting their own coding standards on syntax and well-formedness. If you advocate XHTML as taught by Zeldman et al, then those can be your HTML5 coding standards, too.

The ‘house that Jeffrey built’ is one of concrete foundations, and it taught everyone in the community how to build houses. So what if we’re re-pointing the bricks? Via: diveintomark.org.