Mark Pilgrim — web standards trailblazer, accessibility pro, CSS advocate, semantic web pioneer, XHTML pusher, W3C poster child — has this to say about the XHTML 2.0 working draft from the W3C:
Standards are bullshit. XHTML is a crock. The W3C is irrelevant.
More specifically, he offers this:
The acronym, q, and cite tags are all gone, leaving us, respectively, with abbr, quote, and nothing.
And if anyone has a right to complain, it’s Mark.
Damn it, I’ve done everything the W3C has ever recommended. I migrated to CSS because they told me it would work better with the browsers and handheld devices of the future, then the browsers and handheld devices of the future came out and my site looked like shit. I migrated to XHTML 1.1 because they told me to use the latest standards available, and it bought me absolutely nothing except some MIME type headaches.
He summarizes by saying:
I’m migrating to HTML 4.
On behalf of the W3C, they are in a tight position. They have been assigned with the task of making HTML leaner, meaner, and cleaner while still maintaining usability and without removing existing functionality without good reason. Unfortunately, when they wipe out tags and attributes that have been around for 10 years and don’t offer an equivalent, it starts to become difficult to support their actions. In some cases, as with the img tag, there are replacements. However, in the case of q, cite, and h1 through h6, there aren’t. While the documents will remain viewable as they always have been the semantically rich nature of the document is degraded severely.
While the q and cite tags don’t affect me simply because I don’t use them, the h1 tags certainly do. The W3C has always claimed that our documents should be structured and organized well, especially when using XHTML 1.0 (which I do). This organization allowed browsers and web based application to gain additional information about the structure of a document merely by how certain portions of text are marked up. They claimed that by using such standards, we would allow our sites to be more accessible and less prone to rendering errors. We would make it easier on browser, search engine, and HTML reading code developers to do their jobs and, in the end, make the web richer, nicer, and easier to use. And now the W3C is punishing those that adhered to thier recommendations by requiring that they convert all their code as the tags they have been told to use and use correctly are being depreciated.
To be honest, what little of the XHTML 2.0 specification I have read, I like the changes that are being made. in most cases, they just make more sense. However, to depreciate without warning tags that have been in use for over 10 years is just plain silly.