The good news this week that there is a new “radical proposal for integrating HTTP authentication with HTML forms.”

The bad news is that “this idea has been kicked around for more than a decade” and that “no browsers currently support this proposal.”

The optimist in me wants to believe this will happen. The realist is happy to no longer be forced to work exclusively with http authentication.

I then set out to learn every element by reading through the syntax guides and even reviewing the XHTML Transitional DTD. I learned about localization tags like <bdo> and rarely used tags like <dfn>. Any tag I didn’t recognize I read about.

Which is why I’m still reeling from the revelation that there is a scope attribute for <th> tags. According to Veerle and Roger Johansson, the scope attribute is important for accessibility. I didn’t think there were any HTML attributes I hadn’t encountered yet.

So while I glad to have learned a useful and important attribute for accessibility, I’m not looking forward to reviewing all of the attributes again to see if there is anything else I’ve missed. :-)

It is pretty clear that something has been going on given the sobering testimonial of Roger Johansson who explained why he abandoned and then rejoined the W3C’s HTML Working Group.

Aside from trying to follow the problems (or lack thereof), I’ve been trying to sort out what the next generation of HTML is supposed to be. A few years ago, I convinced my company to standardize on XHTML. We worked our way through the rendering issues and finally had XHTML adoption throughout the organization.

Which is why I’ve been ignoring HTML 5. I drank the kool aid on XHTML, why would I go back to HTML now?

Seeing so much concern over HTML 5 today by the same people who advocated XHTML confused me greatly. What happened to XHTML 2.0? Why are we going back to HTML?

Come to find out, I missed a change at some point. I remember a lot of concern about XHTML 2.0 being unwieldy and a radical departure from HTML and XHTML 1.0, but I didn’t follow the outcome of those discussions fully.

Turns out HTML 5 is the agreed upon next step for both HTML and XHTML. HTML 5 is designed to resolve the issues between HTML and XHTML and converge them into one specification. While I still have some concerns about dropping the requirement or preference for well-formed markup, I’m now more reassured about the direction our core web technology is headed.

The new elements in HTML 5 sound  like improvements. The example of next generation web forms is too good to be true. The clarification of HTML 5 that those participating in the development of the specification have agreed to will be a welcome change and will hopefully prevent someone else from having to do the research I did to sort through the standards mishmash.

Molly’s call for action may have been more alarmist than it needed to be, but there have been some good outcomes from the discussion. If nothing else, I’m now excited about the potential of HTML 5 and finally understand that XHTML isn’t going away anytime soon.