This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Java Buzz by Elliotte Rusty Harold. Original Post: What to Refactor To Feed Title: The Cafes Feed URL: http://cafe.elharo.com/feed/atom/? Feed Description: Longer than a blog; shorter than a book Latest Java Buzz Posts Latest Java Buzz Posts by Elliotte Rusty Harold Latest Posts From The Cafes

Here’s part 4 of the ongoing serialization of Refactoring HTML, also available from Amazon and Safari.

There is one critical difference between refactoring in a programming language such as Java and refactoring in a markup language such as HTML. Compared to HTML, Java really hasn’t changed all that much. C++ has changed even less, and C hardly at all. A program written in Java 1.0 still runs pretty much the same as a program written in Java 6. A lot of features have been added to the language, but it has remained more or less the same.

By contrast, HTML and associated technologies have evolved much faster over the same time frame. Today’s HTML is really not the same language as the HTML of 1995. Keywords have been removed. New ones have been added. Syntax and parsing algorithms have changed. Although a modern browser such as Firefox or Internet Explorer 7 can usually make some sense out of an old-fashioned page, you may discover that a lot of things don’t work quite right. Furthermore, entirely new components such as CSS and ECMAScript have been added to the stew that a browser must consume.