XHTML 2!?

The first public working draft for XHTML 2.0 has been published. Amazingly, Sjoerd Visscher has created an XHTML 2.0 page that works today in Mozilla, Opera, and IE6. I’m not sure whether I should be more impressed by his implementation or by the extensibility of the browsers.

XHTML 2.0 makes a number of changes from XHTML 1.1. Among the more interesting are new tags for <section>, a generic heading tag <h> to work with section, navigation list tags <nl> and <menu>, <line> replaces <br>, and the <quote> tag to replace the short-lived and buggy in IE <q>. “Dive Into Mark” has more about the changes from XHTML 1.1.

One change that concerns me and digiboy | marcus is that <acronym> is treated exactly like <abbr>. Perhaps this is just an admission that IE has supported acronym for quite a while but not abbr. I thought the point of having both of these tags was to help screen readers better pronounce the abbreviation. Otherwise, I see no need to have both.

Update: Evolt.org has an interesting article about the difference between abbreviations and acronyms.