I slowly lost interest in web usability and dog pages and became more and more interested in pure web development, semantic web and open source software.
This was my blogging phase and my blog soon became one of the best-known tech blogs in Germany. Among other things, I developed WordPress plugins, participated in open source projects and experimented a lot with semantic web formats such as RDF.
When the “XHTML2 or HTML5” debate came up a few years later, I was clearly in favour of XHTML2. It was simply the better and more flexible format. And it would have made the semantic web, that the HTTP and HTML inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee had dreamed of, possible. But many people found it too complicated and its validation rules too strict. Only a few managed to create a valid XHTML1.1 page back then.
There were just more and more web developers and everyone wanted a slice of the cake. So HTML had to become simpler. Adapting to the lowest common denominator, resulting in technical mediocrity. That’s what HTML5 still is for me.
XHTML 2.0 was exactly the opposite of simple. But powerful. It would have enabled semantic search engines. And imagine where AI would be today with semantic markup.
So the mediocrity won and HTML5 came. Only because of a few stupid video and audio elements that newbies were keen on and which are no longer used in this as pure HTML elements today. Instead, more complex players are now built with JavaScript.
Commercialization under the influence of large technology companies and the dumbing down of the internet had begun. The academics who had built the web gave way to the mob, which slowly began to flock towards gated communities, and faded into the background.
The golden years of the WWW were over and the dark ages, in which we still find ourselves, began.
