Misunderstanding Markup: XHTML, HTML5—and my lecturers
A few days ago, Smashing Magazine posted a comic strip featuring Jeremy Keith explaining the misunderstandings happening around the terms HTML, HTML 4, HTML 5, XHTML, XHTML 1.1 and XHTML2.
I finally got around to reading it this afternoon—its result: I e-mailed three of my lecturers concerning their statements to related topics.
“JavaScript is a subset of Java.”
This is what one of our professors told us the whole last semester. I knew it was plain wrong, but I kept my mouth shut—I didn’t want to be the guy who knows everything better (we already had some discussions about encodings etc. after class).
But stumbling over said topic again in aforementioned comic, I finally had to “raise my hand” and speak up—this snippet caused the first e-mail:
The second e-mail was caused by the following snippet (edited by me to shorten the sequence):
When I went to another Professor after his lecture to ask him why we had to use XHTML 1.1 for our assignments though he didn’t tell us to use the correct MIME type (application/xhtml+xml), he told me we could live without this information being correct since this was a lecture aimed at beginners. In my opinion, this is no excuse—he could just demand XHTML 1.0 and everything was fine automatically.
The third mail was the shortest one: I mailed another lecturer about this comic to make him aware of it.
I learned something very important once again tonight: Talk to people. Especially if (you think) you know something better.
I’m part of the German WaSP Interact team and a proud Webkraut. And I take our mission’s goals more seriously than ever.
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Javascript a subset of Java? Yes, they have nearly the same syntax, but so do PHP and C++ and all those curly bracket programming languages.
When I first coded Java on the first look it was the same, well strongly typed, but then it had classes instead of prototypes and JS had all those syntax shortcuts.
Maybe If you first code Java and then use some jQuery, you might think it’s a subset, because many don’t really care about the Javascript stuff using the rather simple jQuery things.
Anyway, I didn’t like the cartoon – It proclaims that XHTML is not dead, but the only thing in it’s scope seems to be the syntax. When I first read about HTML5 having an XHTML part I thought – well ok we have the syntax. But you don’t read anything about the modules that were introduced in XHTML1.1 and were to be extended in XHTML2 for nice embedding of metadata, as known from RSS-Fedds. This is in my opinion another big part of the XHTML idea, that would die in favor of backwards compatibility.
I’m really interested what a semantic web looks like if it is backwards compatible. Millions of people using their own “semantic” values for class attributes? No more DTDs? A huge XML database might be more straight forward?
The web language are going to evolve years to years.
Their improvements sometimes make the code easier & sometimes did make it become harder.
The best is to always experimeting with them
Well so much languages have evolved over the years. Even the basic HTML runs well with lots of errors. So keep them running until they create some problem.
So, that means JavaScript was not a subset of Java?
@Bernhard: I hate to say it, but I think the cartoon was primarily aimed at the not-so-techie crowd of people working on production web projects on a daily basis. They don’t know about more than the basics, and unfortunately they don’t need to.
At university, we had some simple DTDs to do for an XML assignment—but I don’t think many people really grasped or are even interested in what their “XHTML 1.1” doctype statement means. I was pleasently surprised to receive an answer from my Professor: He thanked me for the information I provided and assured to change his lecture accordingly. WIN!
@Raymund: Exactly, Java and JavaScript are not related to each other. All they have in common is (a part) of their names and a bigger chunk of their syntax.
@All: Thanks for your opinions.
Julian
It’s not that important, since Microsoft is reluctant to follow the standards like everyone else. And Adobe will do whatever they can to block/slow down the video feature in the upcoming HTML version.
Great post! I actually need to learn more about HTML and XHTML to really be dangerous!