XHTML2/objections

The publication of the XHTML 2 second public Working Draft was met with a few acute objections:

• comments on 2002-12-12 XHTML 2.0 WD posting to www-talk from Daniel Glazman
  

As it is in its 2002-12-11 WD, I think that XHTML 2.0 is far away from both what the Web Authors are expecting and from what could be done to "lead the Web to its full potential"... XHTML 2.0 does not contain ANY new key feature and seem to get totally rid of all Authors' requests between 1998 and today.

• Re: XHTML 2.0 considered harmful posting to www-talk from Daniel Glazman
  

XHTML 2.0 seems to me the live proof that something is going wrong at W3C. I feel that this spec represents a solution maximizing the gap between authors' needs and industrial standardization compromise... I strongly suggest dropping all "XHTML 2.0" efforts in favor of a new "xHTML 5.0" language. Clearly a successor to HTML 4, feature-oriented, made for the _web_.

• XHTML 2 and all that blog posting from Jeffrey Zeldman
  

Today I agree with Mark [Pilgrim] in having no desire to use XHTML 2. (Which I can’t anyway, since it’s not a final spec and no browser supports it or will for years, if ever.)... it also remains to be seen whether developers and browser makers will rally ’round the flagpole of XHTML 2 or ignore it.... My hope is that W3C will change the name of XHTML 2 to indicate that it is a different (and alternative) markup language, not a dead end for the XHTML we currently know and use. My hope is that the language I know as XHTML will continue to be gently upgraded in parallel with that different, alternate markup language. The standards I use every day work for me, and I owe most of them to W3C. I’m giving that organization the benefit of the doubt -- and telling them my concerns about XHTML 2.0.

• Eddies in the space-time continuum blog posting from Mark Pilgrim
  

[Jeffrey Zeldman] feels that with some major surgery (and a name change), XHTML 2 can be salvaged. I’ll be revisiting XHTML 2 in about five years, assuming it survives that long... As to why I’m not using XHTML 1.1 anymore, well, I’ve tried it on several occasions for varying lengths of time, and I’ve come to the inescapable conclusion that it’s a pain in the ass with no demonstrable benefit. XHTML 1.1 is only supposed to be served with a MIME type of application/xhtml+xml (serving it as text/html is evil), but the application/xhtml+xml MIME type is completely unsupported in Internet Explorer and has nasty side effects in Mozilla. A single missing closing tag makes my home page disappear entirely in Mozilla (it shows an XML parsing error to the end user instead). This is unacceptable.