It is obsolete in XHTML 2.0 Standard however it doesn't appear to be deprecated in XHTML 1.1 as I originally assumed. HTML 5 is a bit of a throw back for the W3C as XHTML 1.0 was designed to entirely supersede it; I think the prevalence of AJAX was part of that.
I doubt you'll ever see browsers stop supporting it. Even if we did all move to XHTML 2.0 they'd probably still keep previous HTML and XHTML backwards compatibility in there.
Well that's not really a problem. The back end, it would be argued, would probably just give it a <span class="bb_italic"> with the relevant stylesheet. Even Tim Berners-Lee stated that he never actually imagined people hand rolling the code and that's probably the way it should be, if BBCode is a more accessible level then who, other than the developer, cares how the transformation of that code is done?
I think the ideology behind all the "futurist" web development is to separate the semantic markup entirely from the rendering. As <i> is considered a rendering instruction then it's been removed. Of course I'd be happy to argue along side you that <i>italics</i> is much more meaningful than <span class="some_random_css_class_that_makes_italics">i talics</span> is to both a human and a machine.
There is a good summary article of XHTML 2.0 on IBM's website.
I confess I wasn't aware of that - I thought XHTML was supposed to be a parallel/augmented standard, not a replacement.
Without excessively prolonging the discussion (and boy, have we confirmed the 'geek' question with these posts!), looking at the XHTML spec I think it pretty unthinkable it will replace HTML anytime soon. It's the "hand-rolling" thing you mention: I think being able to hand-roll HTML by hand is still very important, and it seems to me far more difficult to do that with XHTML.I doubt you'll ever see browsers stop supporting it. Even if we did all move to XHTML 2.0 they'd probably still keep previous HTML and XHTML backwards compatibility in there.
Thanks for the informative post though - lots of stuff I didn't know...
Totally missed it, sorry.
Obviously not the only one as HTML 4.0 was the last one... and here's the fifth version . Basically they took HTML and orphaned it from SGML and re-hammered it into XML for XHTML 1.0. XHTML 2.0 is the first one the seriously branches from the way HTML used to look; and I think they are going to have a tough time convincing Mozilla and Opera to even think about supporting it; let alone Microsoft.
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