Greg and Kat's blog

After a simple query from a colleague about the differences between HTML versions, I wrote this. I thought I might as well post it. Everything was from-memory, so there may be some minor errors.

HTML 1 never existed (it was the informal “standard” that the first documentation implied).

HTML 2 was a really minimal initial description of the language. The language was simple because the initial goals were simple. The browser makers made many de facto extensions to this by implementing random stuff.

HTML 3 was an abandoned attempt to standardize everything and the kitchen sink. HTML 3.2 was a really ugly standard that was basically “here’s what browsers accept today.”

Which brings us to modern history…

HTML 4 was an attempt to clean up the language: get rid of the visual stuff and make HTML a semantic markup language again. It included the transitional version (with most of the old ugly stuff) and strict version (as things should be).

HTML 4.01 was a minor change: missed errors and typos.

XHTML 1.0 is HTML 4.01 but with XML syntax: closing empty tags with the slash, everything lowercase, attribute values quotes, etc.

XHTML 1.1 contains some minor changes, but was abandoned in a practical sense because nobody saw any point to the change. XHTML 2.0 was another very ambitious change (non-backwards compatible changes to the language) that was abandoned.

HTML 5 is in-progress of being standardized now. If you ask me, there are two camps driving it. One who thinks “the web is more about more than just simple web pages now: applications and interactivity rule the day” and another who thinks “closing our tags is too hard; I don’t understand what a doctype is: make it easier. Dur.”

As a result, there are some things I like and some things I don’t. I is showing signs of something that will actually be completed and used (unlike HTML 3 and XHTML 2).

Most people don’t know that the HTML 5 standard includes an XHTML version as well. It will be perfectly legal to write HTML 5 with the XML syntax and call it “XHTML 5”.

Addendum: The moral of the story is that I have no intention of teaching HTML 5 anywhere until the standards process is done. For 165 I also need real browser support: no JS/DOM hack to get IE to work, and some defaults in the system stylesheet to let the thing display reasonably without any CSS applied. Even then I will probably teach XHTML 5 because I think it promotes the right habits.