Possible Duplicates:
HTML 5 versus XHTML 1.0 Transitional?
Why are (X)HTML 5 and XHTML 2 separate standards?
At the end of the day, why choose XHTML over HTML?
I mean, the HTML and XHTML models have been a mess for the past years.
I'm one of those web developers that when learned about a thing called "standards", that started to develop websites only in XHTML 1.0 Transitional and later XHTML 1.1. It seemed much better than the current (at the time, and now, still) HTML 4.01 format. Overall, seemed a better formed standard, forcing use to close every tag, allowing self close tags, etc... Also, I've seen much more websites developed in XHTML than HTML...
I know that XHTML 2.0 and HTML 5 are in the works for quite some time and I'm still confused by these two... As adopter of XHTML 1.x, my gut says to go when XHTML 2.0 over HTML 5 (when they are out of course). All I've seen about HTML 5 so far, was more multimedia oriented and I don't develop much of those websites. But I haven't seen that much about it either one of them. Still, I think that XHTML 2.0 seems the way to go for someone that mostly developed websites in XHTML 1.1.
Then I saw the Google Wave thing that Google is cooking up and I'm think that HTML 5 has some real potential, some cool features and it's not just for multimedia websites.
And now I'm thinking, which one is the future? XHTML 1.x seems more prominent these days, will XHTML 2.0 continue this trend or will HTML 5 take over? And why?
Better yet, why can't there be only one? Why do we need all these standards? I migh be a little off here but I always though that the XHTML standard variant was the "new" HTML 4 if you know what I mean. A replacement of sorts for this old standard know as the HTML 4 but it doesn't seem that way as you know have two new standards coming up, HTML 5 and XHTML 2.
And to finish, where does XHTML 5 fits in the middle of all this mess?