Comment by kjhughes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kjhughes | Hacker News Reader

First, here is a direct link to the title post (rather than to an index in which the intended post might be lost): http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/202109/msg00001.html

Second, this is not about the Semantic Web, despite 'Semantic' and 'Web' appearing together in the title. It's about the history of semantic markup, which is where markup is meant to describe what text is. (Since it's about "meaning", the word semantic is used.)

Be sure to see the video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77qDvd5uOx8), presented by Simon St. Laurent at 2021 Balisage, a conference for markup specialists, if you are interested in the evolution of markup from SGML to HTML to XML to XHTML to HTML5. To whet your appetite for what the video is really about (not the Semantic Web), Simon starts like this:

Hello, this a story where we, the fans of meaning conveyed by markup, mostly lose after a long winning streak. To soften the edges a bit, I'm telling the story with Playmobil figures...

It's very well written and cleverly presented -- worth a watch if you're at all interested in the historical arc of markup.

> here is a direct link to the title post (rather than to an index in which the intended post might be lost)

That's helpful, but I was linking to the thread index since that post spurred the majority of discussion in September, not just the direct responses bearing the post's title, so be sure to read all responses. In particular, I found interesting the tension between those seeing XML as a general-purpose serialization format (and wanting to simplify it further) vs those who're unhappy with XML having lost out on the web and sticking to SGML, HTML, markdown, etc. as formal document formats, a recurring topic on xml-dev.

Honestly I'm glad it failed, not in a misanthropic sense, but I think that the idea of xhtml was too ridged and therefore it failed. Other semantic projects have the same issue, not just RDF, but also Lojban, and even formal math. There needs to be some basic structure but outside of that the freedom for interpret and give meaning.

I think XHTML failed due to a lack of tooling. It was an attempt to force HTML into a formal "compiled" form which machines could understand. Thus what was needed to authors was to use tools to write "source code" (like Markdown) and then "compilers" to transform that into XHTML. Then you needed to be able to verify that it was correct (otherwise you'd get an error message).

As far as I know those tools were either immature, nonexistent or proprietary/expensive.

I remember back when XHTML was in vogue (a long time ago now) that there was a blog on the web that advocated for it and somebody posted a comment with an errant character or an unclosed tag or something and overly strict parsing broke the blog on all browsers.

I thought that signaled the death knell of XHTML.

That's really just a failure of input sanitation or not properly escaping special characters or putting the comment in CDATA when constructing the XHTML. Basically that blog allowed an injection attack. Not XHTML's fault, the same software would have allowed any comment to do god knows what in HTML.

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