Second Tutorial

Second Tutorial

Why we need to throw away HTML when it does so good?

Still remember the topic in last tutorial? Yes we've talked about the basic organization of a webpage and the mechanism--HTML--we used to suffice the organization. Indeed, HTML once upon a time did so well that many people, including me, believed it would lead the way in the future website development. But later on, when some disadvantages started to rise people changed their mind.

Before we start with the first disadvantage of HTML, I'd like to ask a question: How many of you have ever used HTML to "program" a webpage. I believe some of you do have that experience. As we've discussed before, HTML divided elements in the website to make it clear to both the browser and the reader. But you may have found that some elements are actually about styles. For example, the <b></b> element, is actually defining a string of letter to be in bold style. So are the <i></i>, <s></s> and so on. On the other hand, we are defining string of characters using the <font></font> element's attribute. The different ways apply to solve the same kind of problem will result in chaotic programming. Worse still, the two different ways have overlapped each other, somewhat. The bold style for instance, may be represented in the font's style attribute. And to make the the situation worse, many times we need to apply a certain kind of style to many many strings. If HTML is the only way, that we'll have to add tags individually to the target strings. It will definitely cause unnecessary redundancy and manual work.

Secondly, HTML syntax is pretty loose. That means, you may have a great bunch of syntax mistakes within your website and still have a page shown. Sometimes it's good but it will bring you nightmare to debug and maintain. Since errors are tolerated, you may not have any idea about what's going wrong with the webpage if it doesn't show up as you wish. Remember that sometimes just a missing of tag ending may lead to serious layout change, and worse till, you just can't locate the problem within a mess of codes.

Thirdly, the "browser war". Actually it is due to the historical development of HTML language. At the very beginning, HTML just support a few of today's features. Webpages are no more than several structured pure text documents which live on the internet. Later on, more softwarr manufacturers start to pay attention to this field and developed their own browsers to support the language. However, rather than signing an agreement of the language development, they start off in different directions. They developed some unique tags which are only supported by their own browsers, because every company have a dream that they will rule the entire web by creating their own standards. At the same time, the creater of HTML, w3c, also launch different version of HTML to suffice the need. Endless elements are required to be included into the language, as a matter of fact, everyone was tired of the chase. The browser developers were exhausted to upgrade their software in order to keep up to the trend. The webpage programmers also showed great unwillingness to follow since their need to remenber everything newly invented in the language, though at a risk that they would be left behind of the technology. And for HTML itself, redundant tags and attributes had already made it too fat, unable to move any further.

To conclude, every developments has its own stages. Once a thing has reach the limitation, the next step is to invent something new to replace the old one. That's exactly what we've done in web programing languages. At the sunset of HTML, XML, a brand new language brought by the scientists, was launched and denoted a new era of web programming.

Referrence: XHTML: Example by Example, Aaron E. Walsh and Dave Raggett, Pearson Education

Online Resources:

History of HTML

Introduction of XML by W3C

Would Wide Web Consortium