Comment by pluma | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pluma | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Were you there when XHTML 2 was born and died a slow death? The Semantic Web died with the rise of search engines. Not that the well-formed, validated markup we had back then was generally even remotely semantic. Heck, even Google wasn't able to save semantic markup.

XHTML wouldn't have fixed anything. To make XHTML work on the web, browsers would have needed to make so many compromises we'd just have ended up with something even worse and less specified than HTML is now. HTML5 won because it codified all the compromises browser vendors had to make to deal with broken, real-world markup.

Sure, there are HATEOAS implementations that use HTML as a data format but the semantics of HTML are so generic and insufficient that all you're really gaining is being able to use an HTML parser instead of something easier to implement and more widely supported, like JSON.

Let me repeat that point: HTML semantics are insufficient and too generic. That is why microformats were a thing and embedded metadata was standardised in HTML5. So you can bolt on your custom semantics in a standardised fashion if you really want people to parse your markup.

HTML semantics are only sufficient to describe the structure of a document. And even that they don't do very well right now (just ask anyone who takes accessibility seriously and knows the WHATWG and W3C HTML specs).

Yep I was there. But XHTML did not die due to lack of semantics. One of the things it had was namespaces, and people did embed other XML specs in their documents (remember MathML, RDFa?). It was just too complicated for most people, and when AJAX became a hit people flocked to JSON. Remember, AJAX used to stand for Asynchronous Javascript and XML(!) that part got lost in translation somewhere. Besides, with JSON all the semantics are out of band in some (hopefully well written) doc, rather than in a schema or DTD (which used to resolve in band, even). Comparing JSON to HTML in terms of semantics is silly: both have none. But the idea of using hypertext markup for both display and machine readability, that's something that I would still like to see resurrected

> It was just too complicated for most people

Not just people. What's the point of being able to embed MathML in your XHTML if there's only a single browser that understands it? And what's the point in using XHTML when you need to pretend it's just HTML tagsoup for 90% of your vistors' browsers?

> rather than in a schema or DTD (which used to resolve in band, even)

Except that only happened with a very small number of tools. Browsers never cared about DOCTYPE declarations other than as a signal (or at best a bunch of ENTITY definitions). And schemas provide no use other than validation.

XML is more verbose than JSON and XML Schema is more established than most of the JSON equivalents but none of that is relevant when talking about HTML. The only thing you gain from embedding your metadata in your HTML is colocation.

Truth in DOM was a dream that web developers chased for more than a decade. The reason it doesn't work is simply that rendering information is a lossy process. You either end up duplicating the same information multiple times in your markup (once for presentation, once for display) or adding layers of indirection to render or reverse the render at runtime. It's a fool's errand.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com