51

Thanks for the excellent preview! Looking forward to it.

I was surprised however that there was no mention of things like Web Forms 2.0 and the Canvas element. Don’t they fall under HTML 5 too? Or do they just fall outside the scope of this particular preview?

posted at 08:51 pm on December 5, 2007 by Alexis Deveria

53

@Lachlan

Understood, thanks for the clarification. My concern is that the people going “is that all?” may not be all be aware of how many more (and familiar) features HTML 5 includes.

Would be nice to seeing more of these developer-friendly articles on HTML 5 features appear as the specification matures.

posted at 09:37 pm on December 5, 2007 by Alexis Deveria

54 Still: What are the Goals?

I don’t wish to pick on Sander (comments 49, 50) but his comments do serve to illustrate the point I was trying to make.

For example: is “improved readability of HTML source” a goal of the HTML5 effort? The “Design Principles” document makes no mention of this as a goal and I’m sure there are lots of different opinions regarding its merits as a goal. If we’re considering people who do mostly hand-coding of HTML, this is probably a greater concern. People using server-side includes or another templating system may or may not be concerned. People who just want a flashy web site to impress potential clients…who knows?

So the point here is two-fold: 1) is this a goal? 2) which group of people deserves more/less weight when evaluating the possible solutions? To the last part, there are other ways to improve readability. Consider this if you will:

Clearly the ‘startof’ and ‘endof’ would be new attributes that could be implemented tomorrow without any impact to existing browsers (they should already know to ignore something unfamiliar). However, if I build an application that is aware of the attributes, the application could do special highlighting or tabbing or whatever to help me out as I compose or review the source.

Obviously this is only an example, but considering that there would be a way to meet the goal with no impact to the vast majority of the installed base (as opposed to introducing new tags), does this idea deserve any more/less consideration? What about resolving conflicts between people who love the idea and people who hate it?

The HTML working group does not appear to have answers to these questions. As far as I’m concerned, they need to have such answers so that discussions like this can take place. Without the discussions, the risk is high that HTML5 will be neither particularly relevant nor particularly useful.

posted at 01:27 am on December 6, 2007 by Peter Kurrasch

55 Hmmmmm...

…formatting goof. The example was supposed to look like:

<div class=“example” startof=“something new”>
…text text text…
</div endof=“something new”>

posted at 01:30 am on December 6, 2007 by Peter Kurrasch

56 Um...why?

I really, really want to understand why so many people are working so hard to justify HTML. Unfortunately, this article did nothing to enlighten me.

I’m now left with three possibly (probably) incorrect perceptions:

1. There are folks out there who want to ensure that IF browsers drop support for HTML 4 (no, please…don’t…zzzzzz) there will be a spankin’ new DOCTYPE that will not only continue support for these broken pages but will also make their authors feel good about supporting a “new” specification.

2. There are folks out there with severely overblown phobias of closing tags (really, guys, they’re not that hard to type in).

3. There are folks out there who think that all websites in 10 years will be blogs.

Did I leave anything out? Probably.

Please… Instead of focusing your efforts on HTML 5, how about nailing down updates to CSS, or working toward better, more consistent cross-browser support for web standards, or figuring out a bulletproof way to achieve vertical centering without hell, or… I don’t know, SOMETHING. HTML 5 just doesn’t seem to be useful enough to warrant its brain trust.

posted at 06:49 am on December 6, 2007 by Erik Ratcliffe

57 HTML 5 - Header in a strange direction

The header and footer tags are not particular useful as they do not describe their content but rather they describe their position on the page.

Any content in the header, for instance, would therefore always be restricted to the top of the page. And as others have said what actually is the “header” and what should it contain? Does apple.com have a “header” or a navigation bar or is it some strange combination – a naveader?

posted at 11:51 am on December 6, 2007 by seb grenning

58 Some good bits

I like the header, nav and footer tags. They seem useful for behind the scenes coding at least.

But the article and section do seem a bit limited where using a div seems to make more sense. Perhaps there will be more “article” type tags to come?

Cheers for the article though Lachlan. Must admit I found it interesting but then to read it would be 15 years away took the wind out of my sails.

posted at 12:33 pm on December 6, 2007 by Tom Leadbetter

59 Headings

@Vlad:

bq.1. This means lower value headings can be used before higher value headings. For example, this will be valid in HTML 5: <body> <h6>heading</h6> <h1>heading</h1> </body>

I don’t think that is the case, unless I’ve misread the spec. If the [h1] is within a [section] or other such block-level element, it will be allowed, but within each block, [h_x_] elements must still be in the correct order.

What this means is that you can dynamically include sections into a document without having to worry about whether each of the headings is at the right level for where you have included it.

2. Skipping heading levels will be valid in HTML 5. For example: <body> <h1>heading</h1> <h3>heading</h3> </body>

That’s fine with me. Sometimes you might be working to a framework, where each [h_x_] heading represents a particular level – there might be some sections that do miss out a heading level. It makes more sense to the overall structure to keep, for example, all the base-level headings as [h4] rather than promoting some of them to [h3] in some sections only.

posted at 01:41 pm on December 6, 2007 by Stephen Down

60 Headers

@Amber:
bq. Does it? What does “header� actually mean? What does it tell me? It tells me, “This is a bunch of stuff that goes at the top�. That’s all header means. I’m not sure that’s terribly helpful.

It’s more than that, it’s like a summary or strapline to the document or section.

For example, search engines could extract any text in a [header] tag and use it on results pages to give a summary description of the page if the [meta] description is either irrelevant or absent.

Assistive technologies could use [header] sections to summarise the page and allow the user to home in on the section they need more quickly – this would give more context than users currently get by just going through the [h…] elements.

It also provides a handy way to mark up a strapline. At the moment, a lot of people are torn between using an [h2] for the line of text that goes immediately under the [h1], because it’s important, and using a [p] or [div] because it’s ordinary text. The [header] element will neatly resolve this.

posted at 01:45 pm on December 6, 2007 by Stephen Down

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