Comments on Comments on Zeldman's XHTML WTF

I've been following Zeldman for 10 years now, and I got on the standards bandwagon early (IE4/NS4-era). It's funny because the whole standards movement was born out the "Best viewed in browser X", font tag soup, 10-level deep table insanity of the late 90s.

However some time around 2002, 2003 what started out as a very pragmatic movement, slowly started to become a religion for a small set of web designers who became increasingly focused on the minutiae of markup. To these people XHTML 2.0 has some sort of mythic status as prophet and savior of the web.

Actually XHTML 2.0 is pretty cool, but with no vendor buy-in it's been dead in the water for forever... a w3c recommendation does not a standard make. Having been through the whole standards gauntlet before, I really don't give two rats titties about XHTML2 or HTML5, although I'd be happy for either to be viable before I retire from web development. I'm not gonna hold my breath though, too much work right now.