I was just reading a story that seems to be getting a lot of love from the news community about the W3C making the decision to form a working group to improve the HTML specification. The premise here is that XHTML has not taken off and HTML sucks so they want to improve the ancient HTML specification to meet half-way between HTML and XHTML. This is a major mistake.

First, I would tend to agree that there are problems with XHTML, there are things that I would like to see added and things that I would like to see removed but overall XHTML is a huge leap forward from where we where with old HTML. XHTML puts more emphasis on the information and deprecates presentational markup. This should encourage people using XHTML to design responsibly for the information whereas HTML does not encourage this responsibility and actually makes it easier to design for the presentation and not the information. Secondly, this is the W3C caving to the whiny old school designers who are too incompotent or too lazy to bother using the new XHTML and CSS standards to design their websites instead of the ancient table based layouts founded in HTML. It is hard enough to get designers to write well formed markup as it is, if the W3C keeps painting a moving target by revising (in my opionon) dead and inferior standards where is that going to leave the web in the future?

Overall I think the idea to revise on old dead standard does far more harm than it does good and I would love to see this effort abandoned as quickly as possible. This is a last-ditch attempt by the W3C to feel good about themselves for developing yet another standard but I for one will have no part of HTML based design, the true future of web design lies in XHTML and CSS.