In December 1997, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) published HTML 4.0 and promptly shut down the HTML Working Group. Less than two months later, a separate W3C Working Group published XML 1.0. A mere three months after that, the people who ran the W3C held a workshop called “Shaping the Future of HTML” to answer the question, “Has W3C given up on HTML?” This was their answer:
In discussions, it was agreed that further extending HTML 4.0 would be difficult, as would converting 4.0 to be an XML application. The proposed way to break free of these restrictions is to make a fresh start with the next generation of HTML based upon a suite of XML tag-sets.
The W3C re-chartered the HTML Working Group to create this “suite of XML tag-sets.” Their first step, in December 1998, was a draft of an interim specification that simply reformulated HTML in XML without adding any new elements or attributes. This specification later became known as “XHTML 1.0.” It defined a new MIME type for XHTML documents,
application/xhtml+xml. However, to ease the migration of existing HTML 4 pages, it also included Appendix C, that “summarizes design guidelines for authors who wish their XHTML documents to render on existing HTML user agents.” Appendix C said you were allowed to author so-called “XHTML” pages but still serve them with the text/html MIME type. Their next target was web forms. In August 1999, the same HTML Working Group published a first draft of XHTML Extended Forms. They set the expectations in the first paragraph:
After careful consideration, the HTML Working Group has decided that the goals for the next generation of forms are incompatible with preserving backwards compatibility with browsers designed for earlier versions of HTML. It is our objective to provide a clean new forms model (“XHTML Extended Forms”) based on a set of well-defined requirements. The requirements described in this document are based on experience with a very broad spectrum of form applications.
A few months later, “XHTML Extended Forms” was renamed “XForms” and moved to its own Working Group. That group worked in parallel with the HTML Working Group and finally published the first edition of XForms 1.0 in October 2003.
Meanwhile, with the transition to XML complete, the HTML Working Group set their sights on creating “the next generation of HTML.” In May 2001, they published the first edition of XHTML 1.1, that added only a few minor features on top of XHTML 1.0, but also eliminated the “Appendix C” loophole. Starting with version 1.1, all XHTML documents were to be served with a MIME type of
application/xhtml+xml. Source : http://diveintohtml5.info/past.html
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