April 2012 Meeting Report

At our April meeting, we finished up from last month comparing how pages validate under different document type declarations. Using both a simple page and one with advanced HTML5 technologies, we saw that while Firefox rendered the pages the same with any doctype, the validation results were completely different.

For more on document types, check the Wikipedia article on the subject.

We then considered the fact that development of  XHTML2 has been discontinued. XHTML has some strict requirements for validation, as outlined at this site, and at a future meeting, we will consider the advantages of that strict markup and whether the looser markup rules of HTML5 might be something to be cautious about.

We finished up by looking at XML to get an idea of where the web might have been going before HTML5. We will have some more to say on that topic in May before we move on to considering best practices for going forward with HTML5.

April 2012 Meeting Announcement -- HTML5 and XML

Last month we played with different variations of document types applied to a sample webpage and then looked at how the differences played out in a browser (none apparent) and a validator (various errors). This month we will finish up with a couple more examples to see why the simple doctype of HTML5 works reliably.

We will then take a side track to look at XML and consider where the web might have been going with XHTML, and maybe where you want to go with XHTML5 -- yes, there is such a thing.