XHTML Version 2.0

There's growth coming up in the future, too: The W3C has just released a working draft for XHTML 2.0, and you can find it at www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/. Here's what the W3C says about this new version:

XHTML 2.0 is a next generation markup language, intended for rich, portable web-based applications. Note that while the ancestry of XHTML 2 comes from HTML 4, XHTML 1.0, and XHTML 1.1, it is not intended to be backward compatible with its earlier versions. Also, this first draft does not include the implementations of XHTML 2.0 in either DTD or XML Schema form yet.

XHTML 2.0 is module-based, and although the W3C indicates that there will be changes from earlier versions of XHTML, the XHTL 2.0 working draft is very sketchy on what these changes will be. A number of elements, such as <br> and <img> , will be deprecated. Other elements will get new attributesthe href attribute will be added to most visible elements to let them act as hyperlinks . And there will be some new elements, such as the <nl> element, which is used to define collections of selectable items.

The working draft is studded with "To Do" notes on items to be added and filled out in the futurethis specification is still in rough outline form. Obviously, there's more to come here. We'll see more on XHTML 2.0 in the next chapter.