<story><title>The evolution of the web, and a eulogy for XHTML2</title><url>https://www.devever.net/~hl/xhtml2</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>pgcj_poster</author><text>&amp;gt; This is unsurprising given the total willingness and business incentive of major players such as Google to drive the applications use case and their comparative disinterest in the semantic hypertext use case&lt;p&gt;Indeed, I am consistently surprised at the document-display features that are still missing from web browsers that are increasingly preoccupied with serving as application runtimes.&lt;p&gt;The web was originally envisioned as a platform for scientists to share documents, but thanks to Google dropping MathML, there&amp;#x27;s still no cross-browser, non-kludge way to display math.&lt;p&gt;Browsers still can&amp;#x27;t justify text properly. Even with hyphenation (which iirc is still a problem in Chrome), the greedy algorithm used for splitting text across lines still results in too much space between words when justified.&lt;p&gt;There seems to be a complete lack of interest in Paged Media support, so if you want your web-page to be printable with nice formatting, you basically need to provide it as a PDF.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve gotten to the point where I&amp;#x27;m often happier to read something in-browser as a PDF than as a web-page. Sure, it can&amp;#x27;t reflow properly, but at least it won&amp;#x27;t have a 2-inch sticky header and make XHR requests to 10 different domains. My vision-impaired father reports that his text-to-speech software now works better with PDFs than with real web-pages. This is insanity.</text></comment>
<story><title>The evolution of the web, and a eulogy for XHTML2</title><url>https://www.devever.net/~hl/xhtml2</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>superkuh</author><text>That last paragraph absolutely nails it. Trying to re-implement the operating system as the browser is mutually exclusive with it being a good browser or standard for webpages.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;If anyone constructed a PDF, which was itself blank but, via embedded JavaScript, loaded parts of itself from a remote server, people would rightly balk and wonder what on earth the creator of this PDF was thinking — yet this is precisely the design of many “websites”. To put it simply, websites and webapps are not the same thing, nor should they be. Yet the conflation of a platform for hypertext and a platform for applications has confused thinking, and led developers with prodigious aptitude for JavaScript to mistakenly see mere websites of text as a like nail to their applications hammer.&lt;/i&gt;</text></comment>