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 veryone interested in the future of the Web must be
curious---and pretty uncertain---about what may be the outcome of
the HTML case. Browser wars and incompatible extensions
tearing apart the language are not only bad by themselves, they're a
sure sign that something's going wrong with HTML in the first
place. It may sound like heresy that the tongue spoken by
millions of Web pages is approaching the end of its useful life, but
many serious observers cannot suppress exactly that feeling.
If we strip away for a moment the innumerable struts, crutches, and
sophisticated gizmos that make the HTML golem walk and speak and look
alive, what we'll see will be a pretty simple (not to say primitive)
markup language designed for basic documents of a quite predictable
structure. Just headers, paragraphs, block quotations, and the good
old ADDRESS at the end. Does this sound like a model
structure for the whole world of information out there?
Of course, now HTML has tables and fonts and all that. Indeed, visual
HTML extensions (or inline images, as the last resort) enable you to
emulate any document structure---that is, make the document
look as if it is properly structured. But as a result, the
internal structure of the text will inevitably become illogical,
cumbersome, presentation-oriented (and with images, the text may cease
to be text at all). This is very likely to prevent reusing the
document in the future; it becomes difficult even to convert it into
another visually oriented format, not to mention isolate its logical
elements.
Fortunately, there's a new important language designed to address this
issue. XML (eXtensible Markup Language) is a simple and compact subset
of SGML designed specifically for use on the Internet in the way that
HTML is currently used. This new project of
W3C is gaining momentum at
a surprising rate, and everybody seriously concerned with HTML may
want to check it out. Maybe someday, you'll find yourself saying,
"Back in those days when everyone was using HTML..."
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