The new XHTML standards from W3C indicate that, over time, backwards compatability to HTML from browsers will not be required.
In other words, all those old web pages you have, or that Google has cached, or that are backed up somewhere? They have more to worry about than bit rot. It’s Sanskrit time, baby. Untranslatable, unreadable.
On the one hand, I can understand W3C wanting to go with tighter, better specs for web page presentation, especially given all the whacked-out things that people want their web pages to do these days (as opposed to, say, just presenting text).
Still, it sure sounds a tad goofy to not just deprecate, but actually obsolete a lot of existing material. The Web seems, paradoxically, like it should be more permanent than that. And while I’m sure there will be some conversion utilities, or some browsers will have add-ons to do ad hoc translation, it’s still … annoying.
and here I was gritting my teeth because the HTML standard is dropping the ‘strikeout’ feature…
er…
The latest revs I’ve seen (which I think are what is refered to in the article) includes a whole bunch of deprecations, including <br>. Eep!