41 Thank you

It’s likely I’ll be retired before HTML 5 is THE way, but I can already see the potential. It’ll be interesting to watch the progress. For the time being I would like to say thank you, Lachlan. That was a well written and informative article.

posted at 04:11 am on December 5, 2007 by Mike Cherim

42 Solutions to all the problems you don't have!

Seems to me that ought to be the subtitle for the HTML5 specification. I did read Shawn’s comments (#33) and I even took a look at the committee’s so-called “Design Principles” and parts of the HTML5 spec.

Personally, I found the “Design Principles” to be the most telling: This is arguably the most important part of the standards process and yet this document is devoid of substantive goals and expectations. I was expecting such things as: What specific problems do we intend to solve? How do we envision the production and consumption of future HTML and the issues posed by each? All I was able to gather is that we “need” to have a new spec. and so let’s go create one and incorporate some of these general/techie ideas along the way.

There are very good reasons to choose Flash over HTML/CSS/Javascript and also good reasons to choose PDF over HTML, and so on. Certainly HTML has many benefits to it and the benefits are quite compelling. But the shortcomings…oh, the shortcomings.

Coming from the developer side of the camp, I agree with everyone’s comments that precede mine regarding the problems developers face: vertical alignment, column alignment without tables, varying degrees of standards compliance, different/unexpected renderings, accessibility, dealing with browser bugs/quirks/incompatibilities, maintaining colors across platforms with differing gamma corrections—to name but a few! Structuring the general layout of a page? Not a problem. Dealing with h1,h2,h3,… in some crazy fashion? Not a problem. Even dealing with audio/video is not a problem, really, but I’m open to improving that nonetheless.

I do believe there is a place for something that comes after HTML 4.01, but this HTML5 in its current form is not it—and is not going to be it, either. If the W3C wants to lay an egg, go ahead (curious how the graphic that accompanies this article is an egg in a box, no?). If the W3C wants to produce something that will actually get used, the HTML working group needs to start over.

Finally, I understand this process is new so although I am beating up the working group/W3C, I’m really more interested in seeing them improve. I’m not sure what the right forum is for some of my other thoughts and ideas but I’ll spare everyone from more of my ranting! Besides, I have to go figure out why MSIE6 is displaying my stuff in a peculiar way!

posted at 05:51 am on December 5, 2007 by Peter Kurrasch

43 BTW--Link Busted

Forgot to add that if you go to the HTML Working Group’s main page you’ll find that under the Current News sidebar, the “Design Principles” link at the top is completely messed up. So if even the HTML Working Group can’t get the XHTML right….

posted at 06:42 am on December 5, 2007 by Peter Kurrasch

44 “Folks, please read Shawn’s comment and think

Okay I will:

Microsoft hasn’t quite joined the implementation game yet but is involved (Chris Wilson is the chair of the W3C’s HTML Working Group which is working on HTML 5 along with WHATWG.)

And that’s what’s got my pessimism all worked into a froth. Microsoft has helped write standards before (CSS anyone?) and then (not-so-)promptly failed to ever implement them adequately.

I’m dying to move forward. But I feel like one of those cartoon characters running in place while the ghost of Explorer has a hold of my suspenders from behind. Not only am I not gaining any ground, but the ghoul will be the death of me.

Until Microsoft proves they can jump ahead of where they’ve been, I will withhold my optimism. They did that once with IE5 on the Mac – before they let it whither, get passed up and officially die. The large, but not giant, step they took forward with IE7 hardly catches up to where WebKit, Gecko and Presto were years ago.

posted at 08:00 am on December 5, 2007 by John Lascurettes

45 Curly quotes

Even though it’s not code, just an illustration, the use of curly-quotes in the top schematic around the ids and classes is a bit grating.

posted at 04:30 pm on December 5, 2007 by Adam Vandenberg

46 Don't see the usefullness

Count me in along with the others who don’t grasp the necessity of the new tags. OTOH I can see some usefullness in CMSs where things like “header” and “article” might make it easier for authors. Maybe. One could always treat this as xml and translate to div’s with id or class names for production.

Interesting that the example html has ‘div id=“sidebar”’ whereas the html 5 version has ‘aside’. To me, ‘aside’ seems more like a stage direction. What’s wrong with ‘sidebar’?

As for ‘section’, I’ve been using that lately (as ‘div class=“section”’) as specified in xhtml 2.0 spec, where ‘section’ serves to associate a heading (along with level) with the following content. (Along with transclusion that’s pretty much it for my xhtml 2 interest)

I’d much rather see crossplatform support for math equations, alignment to decimal in columns, and namespaced attributes. 15 years is a long time, perhaps most of the web then will be for ARGs taking place within an augmented reality googleverse (ok, now I see the proper use for an ‘aside’ tag)

posted at 05:07 pm on December 5, 2007 by Michael Wiik

47 Huh

I’m really surprised at the negative reaction here. I’ve been really excited by HTML 5 (and the XHTML variant) for a while, and this article just increased that.

posted at 05:52 pm on December 5, 2007 by Steven Fisher

48 Backwards compatibility

What about backwards compatibility of new elements (HEADER, NAV, ARTICLE, SECTION, FOOTER, ASIDE)? Even pretty new browsers like Firefox 2 and 3b or IE 7 can’t style these new elements. Opera 9 and Safari 3 can, but what to do with others?
Maybe some attribute for DIV element is better idea from compatibility point of view.
I just think that nobody will use new elements for compatibility until Firefox 2 will not become Netscape 3 in developers’ minds.
BTW, try it yourself: HTML 5 , HTML 4

posted at 07:57 pm on December 5, 2007 by Andrey Petrov

49 The benefits of the new elements

For people who don’t understand the use of <nav> over <div id=“nav”> (e.a.) – the benefits for you as the author will be limited. You already know what meaning that element will have on your site, so really, all that’s left for you is having an easier styling hook and saving a few keystrokes.
But the thing is, everyone else doesn’t know what id=“nav” means. There is no standard which specifies this, and no way to rely on it. (Plus, other developers will use id=“menu”, “id=“navigation”, id=“navmenu”, or one of a hundred other variations.)
And the real benefit will be exactly for all these other people; probably including benefits we can’t even begin to imagine yet…
What I can imagine is, for example, that screen readers could provide a standardized function to skip straight to the navigation menu (or to skip it altogether), now finally knowing exactly what part of the site is that navigation. Search engines could take all this extra information into account in their ranking algorithms and provide us with ever more useful results. And that’s probably just scratching the surface…

The desire to label these common parts of our sites is there already; we all do it (if we didn’t, it wouldn’t have been considered for inclusion in HTML5).
HTML5 is just providing an easier mold for this behaviour, minutely helping us, and potentially greatly helping the world.

posted at 08:39 pm on December 5, 2007 by Sander van Lambalgen

50 Addendum

Oh, and one other real benefit for us as authors: the new elements will severely reduce the clutter of all the divs blurring together on our pages. – With thanks to Sam Ruby for mentioning that point in his email to the public-html list just now; check out the effect by viewing source on the html5 version of his site

posted at 08:49 pm on December 5, 2007 by Sander van Lambalgen

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