Discuss: A Preview of HTML 5
by Lachlan Hunt
- Editorial Comments
12 DIVs are better
Programming is going more dynamic, generic based. Divs can be anything, I am not sure about the new header, footer, section tags. It is really about typing HTML in HTML5 and I think at that level it is not really needed. Flexibility, the ability to control context for the user (back/forward/navs) and textual goodness make the web fun. I think XHTML and HTML are fine as a base now. I really like the video and audio tags but again, typed… object, embed are much more generic. What about flash? flash tag? what about silverlight? ria tag to fit both. You see the dilemma. if you just keep it to divs, maybe clean up object and embed to one widget tag or object tag. Not sure I like much in the HTML5 spec especially possibly calling SQL right from html, what the eff?
posted at 10:22 am on December 4, 2007 by Ryan Christensen
13 Untitled
http://www.crockford.com/html/ I really liked the things in this article.
posted at 12:35 pm on December 4, 2007 by Radoslav Stankov
14 Untitled
I’m quite surprised by the negative reactions towards the new elements. div elements are indeed more generic, and thus fail to add much semantic meaning to the document.
A header is not much different from a div. Except it adds semantic meaning to a certain portion of your document. This is really a good thing, not a bad thing.
I’ve written a more complete reaction here as I believe these type of comments deserve some extra attention.
posted at 01:02 pm on December 4, 2007 by Niels Matthijs
15 Untitled
Finally the browser vendors focused on browser features like tabs and RSS readers. Now, the web designers started learning CSS/JavaScript language to build their own nice applications on top of the existing frameworks using Ajax. But HTML itself grew hardly at all in the next eight years. I think that from now one, this controversial subject can be more discussed.
posted at 01:40 pm on December 4, 2007 by Genau Junior
16 Good news
This is good news. HTML was lagging behind a little, compared to the other vast improvements made with other web technologies. The additions look good. It’ll make life easier for many designers and developers. I look forward to it.
posted at 02:07 pm on December 4, 2007 by Web Design Specialist
17 Other features
While this article was nice, I was hoping for a list of features that were already being implemented, such as Opera’s new Google Suggests like feature. This looks pretty danged cool, and I’ve implemented it in one section of our code base.
Are there ANY HTML 5 features being implemented in Firefox 3? I haven’t been able to find any mention of such and that leads me to believe that nothing will be coming.
One feature I would like to see in HTML 5 is the ability to mark elements as cacheable for the browser. For many people, headers, footers, navigation, etc. do not change from page to page. Why can’t we tell the browsers to cache those elements?
posted at 03:38 pm on December 4, 2007 by Brian LePore
18 HTML is for markup
From this article (I still need to dig deeper into HTML 5), I can generally support the current proposed changes because it seems it deals with markup.
A lot of suggestions for “HTML 5”, such as Radoslav Stankov linked to crockford.com always seem to forget they’re talking about HTML and instead go off on a tangent talking about how client side scripting (JavaScript) or CSS should have improvement ‘x’ or ‘y’. But that’s not HTML, that’s scripting and styling respectfully and needs to be addressed separately.
Though, I’m not sure of the importance or need for new tags such as “section”, “header”, “footer” and “aside”, but I really like the “Nav” tag. In general, I guess guess it won’t hurt anything as long as said tags don’t become required attributes where people start adding them for the same of adding them.
Cheers!
posted at 03:49 pm on December 4, 2007 by John Bertucci
19 Aside - some quick thoughts
About tags like <aside> …
This tag should be used to define elements related to the main content. Usually this is the right column in most site designs. Which is pretty nice, as you can now have your content and related content separately marked.
It becomes even nicer when there is a vertical navigation. Putting the <nav> tag in the <aside> tag means that the given navigation takes you deeper into the site structure. The pages in the navigation are specifications of the current content.
When the vertical navigation is the main navigation, it doesn’t need to be in an <aside> tag, as it is not related to the current main content.
This is a really nice example of how to structure your page and give elements semantic meaning, so machines have a better idea of how the elements are related to each other. It’s what html is all about, no ?
Looking forward to working with these tags. It’s like getting a second dictionary.
posted at 04:09 pm on December 4, 2007 by Niels Matthijs
20 I'm torn, but...
One one hand, having specialized header, footer, etc. tags seems a bit bloated, but on the other hand, having headers and footers render in a rational way, as a sort of “scaffold” before the CSS is plugged in, sure would be nice.
posted at 04:44 pm on December 4, 2007 by Jeff Chausse
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11 10-15 Years...
The 10-15 year time frame includes the time required stabilize the spec, produce the test suite containing thousands of tests and achieve interoperable implementations. Browsers are expected to implement HTML5 during this time, not wait until after. Indeed, they have already begun, which is why we’re already seeing early implementations of video, audio, and we have had canvas for a long time already.
For comparison, look at CSS 2.1. It’s been 10 years since CSS2 was started and that’s still only a candidate recommendation. However, it’s been relatively stable for a few years now, while still being updated based on implementation feedback.
posted at 08:18 am on December 4, 2007 by Lachlan Hunt