Slashdot Mirror
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."
OK, I'm a curmudgeon. There, happy?
I still design pages using HTML 3.2 standard. Life was happy when pages were small and simple. I'm very put-off by the way HTML now can do things formerly reserved for javascript. Further, people no longer appear interested in the size of the footprint their pages make and the bandwidth necessary to download them.
We rail away at Microsoft and anyone else who adds bloat to software, but the web is now plagued by page bloat and overly clever designs which render poorly at times, take over the browser and sometimes crash it. Behaviour is becomming terrible, but as pages are done by authors who do not really care, so long as it looks like it should and does the basics, they care not what a wreck have created.
Don't even get me started on people whose home page is some massive flash object.
"Hi, we assume you have the latest browser and all the plugins!"
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I don't see Microsoft on the list of those pushing for it. Any chance that HTML5 is compatible with IE7... or should I say, is IE7 compatible with HTML5... Hell, is IE7 compatible with any web standard?
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
And meanwhile in IE Land, we're still trying to get proper CSS Support. It will always come down to the lowest common denominator, especially when the LCD is the most popular browser. Nobody is going to code HTML 5 pages when the most popular browser doesn't support them. It's great that MS has finally made some headway with IE 7, but if they wait another 5 years until their next major release, then they are going to be even further behind. While all the other browsers are working on CSS3 and HTML5, MS is still working on CSS2 and HTML4.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
What we need is an updated version of CSS that lets you do things like reference other elements attributes so that you can create tables and line up things across/down the page. The ability to put different images on the left and right hand sides and top and bottom and all variants off would be great for putting rounded corners on things etc... instead of having to do hacks link putting in extra p tags just for the image.
HTML is more or less fine, give me a better version of CSS anyday.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
This is horrible. The mess of backwards compatibility on the web, particularly in HTML, is what causes so much "liberal" output from web developers and designers. XHTML took a solid step forward in squashing some of those problems by creating a very rigid set of rules to be followed for document markup. XHTML2 addresses the actual semantics of it. Backwards-compatibility is not always a great thing. Something like XHTML2 promises a clean breakaway from the horrors of HTML. This "HTML5" seeks to make the web even worse off than it already is by providing developers and designers a free ticket to make their code as horrifically nonstandard as possible. Documents should consist of well-formed markup that is easily parsed by both humans and machine alike. From a purist point of view, XHTML is blissful, though it does truly have it's own set of issues. From a realist point of view, there will sadly always be backwards compatibility on the Web, but can we *please* restrict it to software implementation and NOT in standards?! The web browser will always need to support HTML 2, 3.2, 4.0, etc etc (not that they do, but they should...). If someone wishes to code in HTML 3.2 then they should. But the next version of the (X)HTML standard should not promote backward-compatibility. It should move the technology forward instead of accommodating for previous bad practices.
"Fact is if MSFT doesn't make the "standard" MSFT won't support it properly."
that's exactly why they should be in the standard creation team.
I thought it was because it was a pointless and unneeded reformulation of existing standards with no BC?
1.1 is not an option if you want to support UA's that only accept text/html and Lynx will never support application/xhtml+xml. All XHTML1.1 does is modularize version 1.0, most users probably don't even know what that means ;-o
Here's what I was thinking: ordinary users don't seem to have a problem installing Flash, which is a several MB download, when they're told that they need it to view a site. So if the Gecko ActiveX control does the trick, those of us who are serious about eliminating IE should detect IE visitors and display a page saying that you need to download the Firefox/Gecko control to use the site (or Firefox itself, of course).
Pretty soon, about as many people who have Flash will also have Firefox running inside IE, and it'll no longer be necessary for many people to cater to IE.
Hover rules aren't useless eye candy. Hover rules are visual feedback letting you know you are over something clickable. If you move your cursor across a bunch of links, it's immediately obvious which one you are currently over without having to pay attention to precisely where your cursor is. Usability++.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
I've tried, I really have, to embrace the Zen garden Juu-Juu of CSS, can you make a simple blog page work in CSS? sure! Can you make an massive website with many different templates and variable width data-areas work in CSS? Yea, if you're a complete lunatic. but you have to get there with hack over hack over hack over hack. Here is the deep dark secret of CSS, it's not designed for layout. It's fantastic for styling, but try doing a Box-model or Float layout and you quickly realizing you're asking CSS to do things it wasn't intended to do, and it simply does not break gracefully the way a simple table layout does (You know floats were originally intended for pictures, not layout areas). So while I respect the purity of a CSS for style, HTML for content concept, in practice CSS is just as much of a kludge as Table design. I've saved hours of time and reached wider audiences of compatibility by going for a hybrid design, but this breaks the "standards".
IMO, standards should follow simple elegant solutions, a hundred lines of CSS browser compatibility code and float hacks is far from an elegant solution. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE give designers a proper layout language!!
Not really. If it is functionally equivalent to TABLE, then it's redundant markup (like the old MENU and DIR list types, which were in practice equivalent to UL). It'll also have exactly the same shortcomings that table-based layouts have (particularly: mixing presentation in your structure, and limits on scalability, particularly going down to small devices like phones). The only thing that will distinguish it from TABLE is that parsers will know not to interpret it as tabular data. You may as well add a "NOTDATA" attribute to TABLE.
The only designers it will benefit are those who follow the "don't use tables" mantra as received wisdom, rather than understanding the reasons behind it. It's just like people who try to use CSS to imitate a table layout in order to present actual tables, because they've heard "tables are bad, use CSS instead" instead of "tables as layout lead to a number of problems with can be avoided by using CSS instead"
Ugh... HTML 5 is the LAST thing the Web needs. That just works to perpetuate mistakes that
we've been forced to deal with for 15+ years now... and holds back adoption of XML formats
that are much easier to process and much more amenable to creating a Semantic Web.
Retire HTML and let's get XHTML2 out the door and get browser support for it... that's what
the Web needs.
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
I'd like to see JUST browser makers and web designers in on the next specs. I under stand TBL (father of the web) doesn't like the idea of "web apps" over semantic documents, but the case is lost. The biggest thing is that the W3C doesn't actually make a fully useful browser of their own... they should defer to those that DO make browsers and those who design web pages and create a spec that's 100% useful and implemented rather than "pie in the sky".
While I agree that page layout on the Web is no where near as simple as it should be (I'm doing a webapp right now, and sometimes it really does feel like alchemy), I disagree slightly with your last point. It's vital to listen to advocates for the disabled--particularly the visually impaired and those with motor difficulties--when solidifying standards like this. The whole idea of the web is accessing information, and if a designer takes the easy way out in terms of implementation and leaves huge swaths of people unable to see the content, IMHO they've kind of missed the point entirely. This is, in part, why tables, spacer gifs, etc. are bad, as I understand it (and also, from my own testing): they really play havoc with screen readers, to the point that a page is nearly incomprehensible. And that assumes the screen reader can make enough sense of things to read them at all--if a a page is malformed enough, there's just silence. I'd imagine the situation with braile-output devices and systems for navigating by alternative means are similar.
Government websites have to be fully accessible according to a government standard (508, I think), but non-government websites certainly don't. And making the argument that the visually impared/those with motor control difficulties make up such a small percentage of the population is not only superfluous, as even ten percent of the total internet population is well over 100,000, and the number of people with alternative access needs will only continue to rise as access proliferates, but outright discriminatory. If the guilding principle of the web is information and communication for all, exclusion isn't an option.
(I realize I'm not using exact statistics here, but I unfortunately don't have time to look them up right now.)
For the webapp we're doing, our team is adhering to the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) 1.0 (http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-AUTOOLS/). This set of guidelines and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are perhaps more important than entanglements over HTML5 and such right now, as they're concerned not only with implementation (how a page is programmed), but how it is designed, from the ground up, to be accessable to all. Implementation should flow from this, IMHO.
You are very correct. CSS gets much more hacky than "legacy" layout if you try to do any significant layout with it.
I tried to make a simple 3 column table with CSS only. After struggling with that for an hour, I said fuck it, and put an old style table in there. It was much easier.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Okay, but just to play the devil's advocate here, why should that be part of the page design, and not a feature of the user's reader, perhaps as a configurable option?
It used to be pretty standard for people to customize their browsers in order to change the text, link, followed-link, background, hightlight, and other colors; why does the page designer necessarily know better than the users themselves what the user wants?
We've moved a long way over the past few years towards making the browser into a generic 'portal' that simply displays whatever the web developer wants to toss up on it for the user to look at; frankly it's very television-like.
However, there is a completely different conception of the internet where the pages should be marked up as generally as possible, and the user's browser should then choose how to display the information in a way that's meaningful to the user. It would probably mean that "your Internet" wouldn't look anything like "my Internet," but there's no inherent reason why that's bad. We've grown to treat it as if it is, but that's only because we want the web experience to be like flipping channels on a TV, where your Discovery Channel looks exactly like mine.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
He spent $6k once to make $1.6k a day.
AccountKiller
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
Did you even read my comment? I'm talking about when you are moving through a list of links, like a navbar. Just because the links look like links and your mouse pointer indicates that you are over a link, it doesn't mean you are getting strong visual feedback about exactly which link you are over.
Take a look at your own page. You provide an unstyled list of links at the top. When I put my mouse over the first one and move it down over the list, it's not obvious exactly which one I am over when I am anywhere near the edges. I have to look at the status bar if I want to be sure.
This is not about funky layouts or designs that scew things up. This is about a totally normal situation — adjacent links — being slightly improved by the appropriate use of visual feedback.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
And so forth. Certain other things that other people have called for, I'm more agnostic about, like built in support for drop shadows and rounded corners, but there'll be no love lost on my part when they finally replace the current standards.
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
Probably better to not post the link. From what has been described, I doubt the site could withstand a slashdotting.
"It's not whether you win or lose, it's how drunk you get." -- H. J. Simpson
And therin lies the problem, the w3c make a big shouty shiney deal out of "validating" HTML and CSS markup in pages - wether or not it actually produces desirable output in the shitty attempts at support by ALL the browser vendors - and not copyrighting the terms "HTML" and "CSS"* and then not allowing browsers to claim to render them unless the BROWSERS ITSELF CONFORM TO THE SPECS
*yeah i know it's too late for that now but "HTML 5" could be called "WML : Web Markup Language" instead, whilst being new and buzzword-tastic, M$ could not then release a "WML Support Upgrade" for IE7 unless the w3c said so.
too bloody simple, obviously
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.