Has HTML lost its way

Eric posted to xml-dev - his view of HTML futures. Based on his blog entry which collates some solid detail on his concerns. He's basically agreeing with Norms issues and discussing others, seeming mostly concerned with the move from documents to applications. He (rightly IMHO) comments

...over specifying how to use a document is a risk to block creativity and increase the coupling between applications.

Which I interpret as the temptation that any WG has to overstep the mark and reach beyond what is in the interest of users. Eric comments rather astutely, when looking at the history

The approach looked so obvious that W3C has probably neglected to check that the community was still following its works.

My view on HTML usage goes back to the simplicity of HTML 1.0 on a netscape browser. See a page, copy some of it, hey, it works! Without any knowledge of SGML, parsers or validity, users are writing 'code' or markup, that works and does mostly what they want. Tool authors found they could sell product by following that market. The browser vendors (givers today?) fully supported this by rendering darned near anything. The result is the tagsoup that we see today on the web. Why the hell does W3C think they can change that by publishing lots of specs supposedly HTML based? Eric comments

Migrating a site from HTML to XHTML involves an additional work which is only compensated by the joy of displaying a “W3C XHTML 1.x compliant” logo!

Yippee. Who cares? Very few. My myopic view of commercial web development is the use of html tools up to the point where marketing ask for more, then one of the Flash/Silverlight/XUL comes into use. Why the hell should they care at all what the W3C are doing? Is the site doing what marketing wants, that's a far more interesting question. At the other end of the spectrum, the home user publishing his or her own content is most likely to use a (budget constrained) tool that is long in the tooth, with a feature set meant to appease a majority and work with most browsers. Again, W3C standards simply don't come into the equation. This begins to look like a problem with no solution in sight. W3C wants to do the right thing but seems to have lost view of the user base. The users are chasing different goals, drifting off in a different direction (possibly Erics 'applications'?). Eric suggests the result is WHATWG

I'm trying to imagine what someone coming into web publishing will make of the options today. It took me perhaps an hour to grok the ideas of HTML and produce a minimal document. What expectations does a new user today have when approaching the keyboard? Do they expect interactivity? Is an 'application' a better description than a document? Where will this new user go for inspiration? Facebook? YouTube? A plain HTML 'document'? What will make/encourage them to go read something on the W3C site? If they do, what chance do they stand of understanding half of what they read? Look at the length of the recent (X)HTML specs. Comprehensible? Can this mythical new user go from that to authoring a compliant document in... some reasonable time? What happens when they visit one of the 'application' sites? XUL tutorial pehaps? Silverlight any better/worse? The comparison is surely between one of these applications and what the 'standards' approach has to offer.

Eric goes on to point out some of the weaknesses he sees in the opposing camps. What I see from his comments is the assumption that the browsers rule. The (X)HTML? specification that comes out is of little use without support from the browsers, who are the unknown quantity in all this, especially with Microsoft and its IE8 games. The assumption seems to be that the browsers will continue to be lax in what they accept and likely to display most content. Eric plumps for the XHTML 2.0 solution is better long term, expressing concern over the longevity of HTML5 'applications'. Personally I don't recall many applications that are long lived. On the web, few will survive without constant tending.

My view is that W3C have lost the plot with HTML into the future. Perhaps their work will become an irrelevancy as the web develops outside of their interests. What is sure is that they are spending a lot of time and their members money chasing it. Good money after bad perhaps? A new WG without the bitter history might help.