I recently bought a copy of XHTML for Dummies, complete with the original CD-ROM. I enjoy old computer books and I wanted to lend it to a friend who is thinking about creating a personal website.
It would only be half a joke. If he followed the instructions in the book, he would end up with a much better website than modern guides on Living Standard HTML and the latest ridiculous framework. The strict markup of XML would also stop him from developing bad habits. Of course, plain old HTML-without-the-X parsers will make it work no matter what you give them.
Reading through the first part of the book, I noticed how optimistic it was. It was published in 2000, when XML was shiny and new, and the future for the Web was bright. After the book demonstrated the advantages of XHTML by inserting custom elements into a document using XML namespaces, this passage stood out to me.
So the question we should ask isn't whether XML will replace HTML, but whether XML-based documents (including XHTML) will replace SGML-based such as HTML? The answer to this is inevitably, although HTML 4.0 and its predecessors may be around for a few more years.
Sigh. I wonder what Ed Tittel and the other authors of this book think about the state of the Web these days.
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