The W3C has an interesting announcement on their front page:
1 August 2003: W3C is pleased to announce the advancement of XForms 1.0 to Proposed Recommendation. Comments are welcome through 29 August. More flexible than previous HTML and XHTML form technologies, the new generation of Web forms separates purpose, presentation, and data. The XForms specification is written for authors and implementers alike. Visit the XForms home page.
Strange I didn't see this notice until yesterday (Note: visit W3C homepage more often). But It looks great! I had a quick look into the specification and it is (as always) about separating things. The ideas are good and it isn't hard to learn I think (most people will understand the basics fast, just as with HTML, but most will never fully understand it I think, again this is the same as with HTML, how many people say they know but they actually haven't got the slightest idea, but I'm getting a bit off here).
Sometimes I think the W3C should have a department, which is instructing people how to do things properly. The only thing they do is developing specification, which are getting, from a technical point of view, better and better every year. But for the end user its getting difficult. Only CSS is really big and hard to learn sometimes (never know I would said this) and I haven't started about browser issues yet.
So far the new XForms, which is only one step away from being a W3C recommendation. XHTML 2.0 hasn't updated yet. Another markup thing which I read partly today was the XHTML-Print. It seems the W3C isn't focusing on the web alone. I also read the XFrames WD for the second time in my short live (:p) and I wanted to show an example (just code) how this is going to look like and why(!) it's better than normal frames. The example is copied from the W3C just to save you a read.
<row>
<column>
<frame id="a"/>
<frame id="b"/>
</column>
<frame id="c" source="main.xml"/>
</row>
The code given can and probably will change, although it look good to me. Which would be rendered as (never thought I needed to use pre :)
------- | a | | |---| c | | b | | -------
A link for this could be (and now comes the best part): home.xfm#frames(a=one.xhtml,b=two.xhtml,c=three.xhtml). If this isn't enough for read more about this example: Populating a Frameset. Recreating a frames-based layout with CSS and XHTML will come one of these days. Including a by Limpid (Arthur and me) "invented" IE5 space bug :). Yes, IE5 folks.