61 Step aside!

@Michael:
bq. 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’?

The key difference is that ‘sidebar’ is a presentational, positional term. It implies a vertical division with the content on the narrower side of it – and that may not be how you want it laid out. ‘Aside’ is a more generally descriptive term, and could easily be presented in a different way without it being self-contradictory.

posted at 03:54 pm on December 6, 2007 by Stephen Down

62 TEN TO FIFTEEN YEARS!!!!

I’ve not read all 7 pages of comments so I don’t know if this time frame has been explained… but 15 years, the web barely existed 15 years ago and look how far we’ve come now. I’m guessing 99% of what was being done/used to build the web back then is no longer relevant and I’m willing to bet that in 15 years time (with browser technology advancements, etc) the HTML5 spec will be irrelevant. MS could have released 2 new browser versions by then!

I’m all for better tools, API’s, user experiences but surely the minds/companies involved can work quicker than that!

Crikey, I’ll be looking to retire then!

posted at 05:42 pm on December 6, 2007 by Dave Chapman

63

@Stephen

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.

Perhaps it’s just me, but I didn’t take the use of header to be another tag to represent metadata. The way I understand it, “header” is just as positional as “sidebar” is or would be.

I’m all for increasing/improving ways to assign metadata to web documents; I’m not sure a header tag would be the way to go to do that. I suspect that when most people think of header they’re thinking of the top of the wrapper that establishes the brand, the title of the site, etc., not the metadata that classifies what we’re looking at.

posted at 05:49 pm on December 6, 2007 by amber simmons

64 Untitled

@amber
I’d have to agree looking at the new tags they seem to be there as a hint to layout rather than semantic meaning – from what I can understand I see no benefit from using <div class=“header”> or <div role=“header”> over <header> – unless what goes into a header will be restricted…

Or am I missing the bigger picture?

And all this is a bit pointless unless we get buy-in from MS (which was mentioned in article) – same thing is happening with ES4/JS2.

posted at 07:45 pm on December 6, 2007 by Dave Chapman

65 Really, we need to do this?

10 to 15 years and they are basing tags off of what’s being used right now. I dislike div-itis as much as the next guy, but the flexibility of DIVs sounds like something I’d rather use than canned layout based tags.

posted at 08:14 pm on December 6, 2007 by Erik Hanson

66 Sorry, kill this test comment, please!

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr, sed diam nonumy eirmod tempor invidunt ut labore et dolore magna aliquyam erat, sed diam voluptua. At vero eos et accusam et justo duo dolores et ea rebum.

posted at 12:37 am on December 7, 2007 by Peter Brown

67 Kill This also

Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi.

posted at 12:38 am on December 7, 2007 by Peter Brown

68 The train now arriving at platform 8 is miraculous

I can’t believe the 5 to 10 to 15 year time scale being discussed on here. I’m mindful of how train operators increase their timetabled journey times to make it appear that delayed services are actually running on time. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/2978349.stm)

If the HTML 5 working group are saying this is the timescale before it can be adopted as an everyday, usable technology, imagine how overjoyed we’ll be when it’s done a year quicker.

I’m sure there is a lot of good work going into HTML 5; however, I personally don’t see any real justification for this amount of time and energy.

Web designers are dealing with frustrating real world problems on a daily basis due to incorrect or incomplete implementations of specs in (some) current browsers and this doesn’t seem to be getting any better.

Forgive my cynicism, but I see little to be hopeful about in HTML 5 when the current state of play is still far from ideal. I’m more interested in being able to write code ONCE that works across all browsers NOW, than the dubious benefits that will come from some future-distant unnecessary spec.

posted at 12:59 am on December 7, 2007 by Matthew Hill

69 bad stuff

sounds fine but way to slow. I cant seriously evaluate something that will come in 15 years. This cant be serious. apar from that the fixed tags like head and article is a bad idea. Pople will put non-nav content in nav-tags. Bad start…

I am a content producer (writer, editor, photographer) I will look more into this. maybe I dont understands all thi techstuff, but my overall feeling is negative because of the timeline.

posted at 02:21 am on December 7, 2007 by Erland Flaten

70 Fix the browsers first

HTML 5 sounds great on paper, but the time table is entirely way too long, and it’s all completely pointless unless each of the browser vendors will support it in full. No browser that I am aware of even supports CSS 2 fully. There’s no excuse for that. CSS 2 has been around for a long time. And of course the one browser that gets it wrong the most is also the most used. IE 6 needs to hurry up and die, and all current browsers should be given full support of CSS 2.1 and even parts of CSS 3 as a minimum. Think about all the wasted man hours spent fixing CSS bugs just so web pages will render relatively consistently. We should all bill Microsoft for the time wasted.

posted at 05:41 am on December 7, 2007 by Jeff Kieke