XHTML 2 for Publishers: New opportunities for storing interoperable content and metadata

XHTML 1.1 and it predecessors are structurally too flat to store even moderately complex content. They also offer minimal options for storing the semantics of published content or the kind of metadata that publishers need to track a piece of content’s progress through a publishing workflow.

XHTML 2’s added structural richness makes content re-use easier, and its greater capabilities for storing metadata at both the document and document component level make it easier to track content resources in a repository or moving through a workflow.

Browsers don’t support XHTML 2 yet, but even before we use XHTML 2 as a delivery format, many of its new benefits combine to make it a viable editorial format that can then be converted to other formats as necessary. For publishers intimidated by the amount of resources needed to develop a new custom schema from scratch, or even by the prospect of adapting a complex schema such as Docbook or TEI to their needs, XHTML 2 can hit a sweet spot between the richness of the more complex standard schemas and the simplicity of XHTML 1 that make it an attractive option for content storage.