The Future of the Web

As I was browsing Digg today in my America and the World class, I came across a very interesting article. Digital Web Magazine's David Andersson explains the basics of XHTML2 and HTML5 in this article. He goes quite a bit in depth and uses plenty of acronyms to describe the future of web coding.

I would also like to take this time to point out something I saw that really caught my attention.

The biggest problem with serving documents as XML on the web is that Internet Explorer doesn’t support the recommended XHTML 1.0 content type (“application/xhtml+xml”). It does support generic XML, but without any knowledge of the XHTML namespace, it has no knowledge of the semantics of any XHTML elements, and won’t even apply the default browser style sheet

For me this was a moment of utter amazement. Has the IE dev team really become so trusting of their audience that they don't feel the need to differentiate between XML and HTML? Another bug that I found out about recently, was the fact the IE treats all jpeg images as progressive jpeg images. This means that they totally throw MIME standards out the window when uploading images. Normally this wouldn't be too much of a problem, but the file data sent back to the server lists the type as an "image/pjpeg". MIME standards are there for this reason. This also begs the question, What else has the dev team done away with?

We already know about the differences between browsers in rendering HTML code and CSS. Most designers hate Internet Explorer for the way it renders CSS, and love the way Firefox renders CSS. Designers also hate Safari when writing any type of javascript code, because it almost never works correctly. Really, the standardization of HTML parsing is just a step in the right direction for a standard CSS rendering process, Javascript implementation and a variety of other tedious items that designers have complained about for years.