XHTML Basic 1.1 finalized, no one seems to care
The XHTML Basic 1.1 recommendation was published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) on Tuesday this week, but no one seems to care. I was a little puzzled, so I tried to find out why…
It turns out that XHTML Basic is a document type that has the minimal set of modules (as per the modularization of XHTML), in addition to a few other basic things. It is “designed for Web clients that do not support the full set of XHTML features; for example, Web clients such as mobile phones, PDAs, pagers, and settop boxes.” Wait, what?
Is this the 90s? Don’t users expect the full web experience on their mobile phone or settop box? Granted, it might be a problem putting a browser on a pager (anyone still use that?), but why bother? Sure, I guess creating a fully compliant browser can be difficult, but there is one company that has made one that is installed on such different devices as the Nintendo Wii and barcode scanners.
There really is no excuse to give users of mobile phones or settop boxes a subpar browsing experience, and any specification that supports that myth makes me sad…