1 HTML 5 has been a bit of a roller coaster ride

… if you read Roger Johansson’s blog

http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/categories/html_5/

It will be interesting to see how this all shakes out.

posted at 06:39 am on December 4, 2007 by Ward Powers

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You know, I really don’t understand the point. What was really wrong with the example using divs? Surely developing such specific tags (as article, aside, nav etc) is only going to end up limiting the scope in future – and once again we will be back to square one – trying to get around the limitations of the spec.

I would think the better approach would be to create a spec that provides better support for microformats, while using a bare minimum of tags.

posted at 06:40 am on December 4, 2007 by Adrian Lynch

3 10-15 years?

Did I read that right? The HTML 5 spec isn’t expected to be done for another 10-15 years? And then how long until browsers support it? A decade is an incredibly long time in web-years — I don’t see how this spec can even hope to still be relevant if it won’t see the light of day for that long.

posted at 07:07 am on December 4, 2007 by Miles Grover

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Ditto #2. If ease is the purpose of the HTML 5 spec, clearly it should have come… last century (the XHTML 1.0 spec officialized in 2000). It is also interesting to note that HTML 5 will be a rather major step in “devolution,” eschewing the abstraction of structure and the implementation of microformats for neatly named tags and pseudo-embeds. I doubt web designers are going to adapt backwards in 2007 A.D.

posted at 07:24 am on December 4, 2007 by Peter Jin

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I’m really wondering, is this possible?

<div>
<nav>footer nav …</nav>
<footer>© Copyright 2007 …</footer>
</div>

posted at 07:26 am on December 4, 2007 by Lim Chee Aun

6 hardly worth it

I agree with #3…. just doing the math, html 4 has been around for 10 years and another 15 for html 5? Plus time for all the browsers to catch up, with the rate of other devices besides desktop computers coming into play, having the same html version for near 30 years seems, well I’m just wondering. How will these things possibly apply in 15 years?

posted at 07:32 am on December 4, 2007 by jeremy hoover

7 SGML vs. XML

I’m still not happy with the SGML version that allows unclosed tags. This burdens people with having to learn which elements need a closing tag and which ones don’t. With XHTML, it’s clear-cut: all of them need one. Also, you can at least check an XHTML file for well-formedness without a DTD. SGML requires a DTD for any sort of validation.

posted at 08:10 am on December 4, 2007 by J David Eisenberg

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Another one who’s slightly worried about the time frame being proposed.

posted at 08:15 am on December 4, 2007 by John Faulds

9 Time Frame

I’m of two minds on this ten to fifteen year time frame thing.

First, I assume that includes time for the implementation, testing, & feedback cycle, so that the end result of 10-15 is interoperable cross-browser implementations.

Part of me thinks that will be too little too late, that if the various parties involved hadn’t been off doing their own thing came together as a unified group a little earlier, having 2010 or so as an end point would have been easy to stomach. By 2017, development habits will have had time to become firmly entrenched (IE6 only had 5 years, look how that went), and transitioning to a newer non-backwards-compatible HTML dialect will be a huge uphill battle. To draw a comparison, XHTML2 is (to be euphemistic) somewhat lacking in relevancy to those of us building web sites day to day because it doesn’t solve enough problems and it abandons the past. Since the new stuff in HTML5 is basically just codifying what we’re already doing in other ways, could that which looks promising today suffer the same fate, given enough time?

But the other part of me wonders, what’s the hurry? At this point we’re not exactly being held back by the lack of these elements in the current drafts. Progress isn’t breakneck anymore, and the rhetorical “web years” from back in the 90’s don’t apply. We can afford to take some time and do it right.

Still. 10 years? That is a rather lot of time. It better really be worth the wait.

posted at 08:54 am on December 4, 2007 by Dave Shea

10 Lowest common demoniator still holding us back

First, to be snarky, who needs “section” when we’ve got this little section DIVider already?

What is the point of adding new elements such as section, header, aside, et al? If one browser (ahem) still isn’t supporting simple things like :before, why would be expect its dominant 800-pound monkey ass to jump now?

I want to be using things that are available to me now through approved specs, that other browsers already support; but I’m stuck with over-verbose methods or out-and-out hacks to bring the previously mentioned ugly gorilla into line so its users get a “modern” experience.

posted at 09:46 am on December 4, 2007 by John Lascurettes