As Jeffrey Zeldman puts it in his recent blog post – XHTML is dead, kinda.

W3C announced a few days ago that the XHTML2 working group will likely be closed down by the end of the year, and focus will be shifted to the development and polishing of the HTML5 standard (which also offers an XML flavour).

To me, this is a quite welcome change – it never made much sense to me to have two competing standards for documents, especially when all the original XHTML standard did was to enforce strict syntax rules (which are rather arbitrary given what is actually allowed under XML itself). This tightening up could easily have been dealt with in HTML4.1, say – and with less problems with Internet Explorer (which is still having problems dealing with properly served XML/XHTML documents even after 9 years).

Now, with the HTML5 development, it all comes back together into a single standard again. Sure, there a few differences between HTML5 and XHTML5 – but less than between HTML4 and XHTML1.1. These differences, however, a easily overcome by applying some of the restricted behaviour allowed in XML documents to HTML (things like not using document.write() and so on).

Anyway – hopefully, this dropping of XHTML2 will result in a better developed combined standard, and this will help browsers to move towards adopting that new standard as soon as possible.

About the worst thing about any project – especially one that is being spun out of your own head – is that you are almost always at square one, with a blank sheet, and an empty SVN repository.

It’s the same as writing something like this post – or any other creative work. Unless you have a clear objective, you can’t really set a direction. Without a direction, you can’t make those first steps.

Of course, in starting a project, you generally have a bit of an idea on the outcome – but you should always set down what your objectives are. Then you can figure out the steps needed to reach those objectives. And once you have those steps, you can work out everything this else.

So, I’ve gotten past the blank sheets by knowing what I want to get out the project – and the only problem left is the focus of attention that the work requires.

Focus of Attention

Lately I’ve been dabbling in Python, which is pretty nice language, and quite fun (a lot of the documentation is written in a familiar rather than over-technical way). But, the experience has been frustrating as well.

After spending time investigating various methods and solutions, I kept hitting on issues with limitations in a particular solution, or scarcity of documentation of another.

I ended up spending more time looking for documentation than I did making any kind of progress (and a lot of the time, I wasn’t even moving forwards).

One major block, I guess, is that I spend 40 hours of my week working on PHP solutions (and sometimes PERL, but only in order to patch or extend an existing script) at the office,  and jamming in another language just wasn’t happening.

So, I took the decision the other night to use and develop the skills I have, and then focus my attention on the work needing to be done instead of reading, reading, reading.

And so, in one 2-hour session, I made more progress than I had done in the whole previous week.

Experience

That’s really the key, when you think about it. I’ve been at PHP since 2002, and clocked up thousands of hours of knowledge and experience along the way. I’m still learning it – sometimes time constraints on projects don’t always let you spend the time to find the better solution – but all that experience does add up.

So, for at least a while longer, I’m going to be a PHP developer.