Discuss: A Preview of HTML 5

by Lachlan Hunt

121 Something to Believe In

I don’t think the HTML5 specification will do anything to progress the Web and more to the point, it will most likely become a lost chapter in web history.

It attempts to further dictate how to markup a document to a Web browser – which in the end is just a program that draws things on a screen to present to the user. Oh, and it has a URL box at the top that allows you to warp to other presentations.

Let’s be honest, HTML was only a solution to marking-up plain text, and it WASN’T great at that either.

As a language, HTML gave the computing world:
1) the ANCHOR tag.
2) JavaScript (Because people quickly realized how dull HTML was)

A better solution:
How about a DirectX mode (Or OpenGL mode?) Or XAML or SVG mode? I mention these just for the out-of-box thinking, not that I want to write up a text document in DirectX.

But that’s why people have been excited about Flex and Silverlight – because it’s write-once, standard across all platforms in presentation.

Christ, we already have 100’s of existing languages that can do this, we just need to say YES this is the new language of the web – and then add some simple context markup to it.

posted at 03:27 am on January 19, 2009 by Karl Beyer

122 Agree with #19

This certainly is an interesting debate, but I think the comment made by Niels Matthijs at #19 and the author’s comments at #11 helped me to get off the fence, and to embrace the new version of the language. Thanks!

- Rod Homor

posted at 05:59 pm on March 18, 2010 by rod homor

123 A Semantic Angel on One Shoulder

First of all, thanks for the article. I came across it while searching for clarification on how the <section> & <article> elements might play out on a page. Your example was great & made perfect sense.

For quite some time, I have marked up all my pages with <divs> with ids (“container”, “header”, “navcontainer”, “content”, etc.), but I’ve always had this nagging feeling that I was somehow cheating the system (semantically speaking). I teach web design to high school students, and I approach the subject with an emphasis on semantic markup, so every time I teach layouts, I always wonder if I should use <div>s in so many different ways (we’ll call it the semantic angel on my shoulder speaking).

I’m a little tired of my semantic demon winning out every time I teach layout design, so I’m seriously considering teaching layouts using the new HTML5 elements the way this article presented it. To me, the extra tags in HTML5 provide what I was looking for (for the most part).

The headers have also given me some semantic soul-searching as well. I usually place an <h1> tag in the “header” div for the name of the site. Every time I do that, though, I wonder whether it’s appropriate or inappropriate to place an <h1> or <h2> at the top of the “content” div. Now that there are semantic sections to my page (headers, articles, sections, etc.), I suppose the title to each of those sections would most naturally be an <h1>, and that problem is solved too.

I still plan to use a container <div> every now and then to allow myself more CSS options, and I’ll probably always have a little semantic angel on one shoulder trying to convince me otherwise.

As to all the authors who have vented over browser implementation (especially IE), I think you are misplacing your anger. It’s a necessary evil, but we’ve been dealing with it for many years now. I’ve learned to add a few conditional ie tags to isolate IE 5 & 6 in order to fix a few of their annoying bugs, add a png-fix, and then I moved on with my life.

As to the 10-year implementation, my understanding is that the <abbr> tag was not implemented by IE until version 8 (from A Day Apart: HTML5 in Seattle). They are being realistic about how long it takes for browsers to get it right (especially IE).

posted at 08:11 pm on July 19, 2010 by hundredvisionsguy