Apple, Opera, and Mozilla Push For HTML5

foo fighter writes "The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has been slumbering the past several years: HTML was last updated in 1999, XHTML was last updated in 2002, and no one is taking seriously their largely incompatible work on 'next-generation' XHTML or 'modularized' XHTML. Both HTML and XHTML are in sorry need of removing deprecated items while being updated to reflect the current practices of web and browser developers and remaining compatible with legacy Recommendations. The much more open and transparent WHATWG (Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group), formed in 2004 to address this problem, and has been hard at work on developing a draft spec for HTML5 to update and replace legacy versions of both HTML and XHTML. The quality of this work has reached the point that Apple, Opera, and Mozilla have requested the adoption of HTML5 as the new 'W3C Recommendation' for Web development."

Comments

Talk about spin!

[Bogtha]

"The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has been slumbering the past several years

No, the W3C have been very busy.

XHTML was last updated in 2002

No, XHTML was last updated two months ago.

no one is taking seriously their largely incompatible work on 'next-generation' XHTML or 'modularized' XHTML.

Everybody is ignoring XHTML 2.0 because it isn't finished yet. XHTML 1.1 is not an option for most developers for one reason in particular: you can't use it with Internet Explorer. Blame Microsoft.

Both HTML and XHTML are in sorry need of removing deprecated items

No, both HTML 4.01 Strict and XHTML 1.0 Strict are available for those people who wish to use a document type that doesn't include the deprecated stuff. And even if they weren't available, nobody needs deprecated items to be removed. If you don't want them, don't use them. Just because they appear in a specification it doesn't mean you are forced to use them.

The quality of this work has reached the point that Apple, Opera, and Mozilla have requested the adoption of HTML5 as the new 'W3C Recommendation' for Web development.

No, they are requesting that the W3C — the organisation you've just written off as closed and useless — adopt their work as a starting point, so that it can be developed further at the W3C. They aren't asking that the W3C give it Recommendation status, they are asking the W3C to take over its development.

Re:Talk about spin!

[Excors]

I think the fact that it's a work-in-progress is the relevant factor to consider when wondering why people aren't using it.

That's not a relevant factor for the Safari developers to say "the HTML standards process has been moribund; the W3C's HTML Working Group has focused almost exclusively on XHTML2, a new standard that was highly incompatible with existing practice" and "We declined to participate in the XHTML2 Working Group because we think XHTML2 is not an appropriate technology for the web". As far as I am aware, Mozilla, Opera and Microsoft are all not planning to ever implement XHTML2, whereas they are already working on HTML5 – HTML5 also has many features that are work-in-progress and which nobody is using yet, but which the browser vendors are already implementing, because they are valuable changes and don't break compatibility with the current hundred billion documents on the web.

Misses the point

[starwed]

The article misses a pretty large point: the w3 has already decided to work on the next version of HTML. The post linked to is a recommendation that the HTML 5 spec be used as a starting point for that work.

Re:Please, give us better layout tools

[apathy maybe]

If you have data that uses a table, use the "table" tag. If you don't, use CSS. HTML is not for describing presentation, that is what CSS is for. As such, your idea for a "grid" tag, is not really for HTML at all.

What happens when your page gets displayed on a phone? With CSS you can simply revert to a single column (or the phone can just drop the CSS), with "grid", you need two pages, one for desktops, and one for phones.

I think XHTML is fine, it works and does the job. The only thing I would like is a client side include. Apart from that, I think CSS needs updating, not (X)HTML (or perhaps just browser support for CSS?).

Re:The More they add, the less I like

[blincoln]

Funny, that's how I feel about people who don't use CSS. Seriously, if you are that concerned with the size of pages and bandwidth, like you say in your other comment, then why are you transmitting your style information on every single page load?

Agreed.

To the GP: I recently redesigned my main website after running it for five years with a design very much like the one you describe - all coded by hand, HTML 3.2, no CSS (although I had some equally old Javascript for highlighting the navigation buttons).

The new version uses CSS, and since I designed it using the "strict" mode of newfangled HTML, it renders more or less identically on different browsers. I also built a batch build content management system, so that I don't have to manually edit a bunch of HTML when I change the design or whatever. I made sure the output is basically what I would have done if I did it all by hand though.

I was very skeptical about it before I started, but it really is a much better way to build websites. It saves time, it makes redesigns and multi-platform stuff easier (like theoretically I could swap out CSS files to make a version formatted for PDAs if I were running a website that would be at all useful on them), and it's *much* easier to get relatively consistent rendering across platforms. The only visible difference I'm aware of between Firefox and IE6/7 is related to tables without a fixed width. Neither one looks superior, they're just different.

Re:The More they add, the less I like

[cultrhetor]

Actually, you can just add a stylesheet that makes sure it renders correctly on PDAs. No need for switching:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="styles/standard.css" type="text/css" media="screen, projection" />
<link rel="stylesheet" href="styles/pda.css" type="text/css" media="handheld" />