Following on from yesterdays dismissive post about specifications I would like to provide some further thinking about this issue.

(Caveat: please be aware I am NOT an expert in these matters. I am just an average developer trying to make sense of this mess and I *might* have misinterpreted some aspects of the story. Please feel free to add any clarifications or ammendments.)

The W3C XHTML 1.0 specification originally came out in the year 2000 which is over seven years ago, thats a long time in this industry. You can read the spec at the below link.

XHTML 1.0 Spec Document.

Now its a well known fact that the evolution of (X)HTML stalled within the W3C after this specification was introduced, so much so that a breakaway organisation formed to work on the future of (X)HTML.

So we have the following situation: a disempowered standards body, a breakaway group of dissidents and a seven year old specification document. That isn't good news for the development community and leaves the field wide open for the browser manufactures to do proprietary innovation. This is already happening and you can view the consequences here. The last thing we need is the further Balkanization of the web. The good news is that the W3C has restarted the specification process and have offered an Olive branch to the dissidents. But its early days.

The logical consequences of my frustrations from yesterday is a growing doubt about the W3C as a specification body. How can we trust them with specifications when the last proper web mark-up specification document (from seven years ago!) still hasn't been properly implemented today. Some examples.

(1) Google search engine doesn't recognise pages with a specification conformant content-type of "application/xhtml+xml".
(2) 90% of widgets, badges and analytical tools use either innerHTML or document.write in their Javascript code. Both of these are INVALID according to the XHTML specification and break in pages with a content-type of "application/xhtml+xml".

But my real concern is where does this leave those of us whose livelihoods revolve around the mobile web. The W3C has taken over from the OMA as specification body for the development of a standard mobile mark-up language. But knowing the above story and being aware that there are already dissidents within the mobile community fighting against the W3C, my question is, where to from here? I like the mobile guys from the W3C but the traditional web scenario is made significantly worse in the mobile world because there are so many more people and companies involved. There are numerous network operators, browser vendors, software providers and certifications organisations each with their own agendas. The entire situation is further complicated by the "one web" debate. Which direction is correct?

At the end of the day the only sane choice for small development houses like ours is to follow what each group are saying, contribute wherever possible but ultimately stay loyal only to the end user. My revelation yesterday was that I shouldn't worry so much about conforming to the specifications and that my more important concern should be that the code actually works, today, and in as many browsers as possible.