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

Re:The More they add, the less I like

[LighterShadeOfBlack]

Life was happy when pages were small and simple. The Internet was also small and simple, relatively speaking. Unfortunately now it's a huge mess of information, some useful, some not. In order to helpfully and meaningfully wade through all this fluff we need to more tags and more specificty in our markup to aid search engines and the like in finding what we really want. We may be a way off from the "Semantic Web" as Berners-Lee envisions it, but these are the first steps towards making that happen and preventing the web from being collapsing under it's own ever-increasing mass.

I'm very put-off by the way HTML now can do things formerly reserved for javascript Yeah, that never happened in the past <blink>Remember me?</blink>. Seriously though, I agree on this in principal although I'm not sure specifically what features in HTML you're referring to. Ultimately any attempt to dynamicise (I know, I know, not a word) HTML will fail as it will always be three steps behind what people want from dynamic web pages since we're now moving into the whole "Web 2.0" thing.

Further, people no longer appear interested in the size of the footprint their pages make and the bandwidth necessary to download them. I'm not sure I agree with this. Relatively modern developments allow far more efficient web pages. Firstly by using CSS you can do a lot more with simple markup while allowing the stylesheet itself to be cached for a reasonable amount of time (whereas many webpages have content which prevents long-term caching). XmlHttpRequest obviously allows for only the relevant portions of a website to be updated. Javascript allows for less data to be sent and for the code to do the work of constructing an elaborate webpage (only applies to certain types of webpages obviously).

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.

...

Don't even get me started on people whose home page is some massive flash object. Sure, some people use poor designs which drain resources unnecesarily, I don't think that's necessarily an issue of new standards or technologies being poor though, just that the flexibility we demand from our new web technologies inevitably allows for misuse. You can't blame Javascript, XHTML, or even Flash simply because some people will misuse it any more than you can blame HTML 3.2 because someone decides to use 24 levels of <table><tr><td> tags to make their layout the way they want. As far as crashing goes, that's a software issue and nothing more.

Please, give us better layout tools

[PapayaSF]

Tim Berners-Lee, bless him, didn't seem to understand that anyone would ever want a web page with more than one column. So some genius (a name I've forgotten) thought of using tables for layout, and many problems were solved: multi-column layouts with headers and footers which stretched to accomodate content and rendered the same way (more or less) across all browsers and platforms. Hooray!

Then came CSS: coding could be much cleaner and more flexible, but tables-for-layout was considered bad, and we began wrestling with creating layouts using divs and clears and floats, having to use such kludges as negative margins in order to replicate table-like behavior. It can be done, but it's harder. So for HTML5, how about setting aside creating new but not-very-helpful features like "overline" (who uses that?) and coming up with things that actually help us create web pages? Why not create a tag called "grid" that acts like a table, but is designed for page layout? Most graphic designers use grids, and it would really help web design as a whole if something like that existed for us.

How about a way of having content reflow from one column to another when a window is resized? Page layout programs have done this for 20+ years, so shouldn't it be possible for a web page and a browser today?

So please, HTML5 people, don't just talk to computer scientists and advocates for the disabled when creating this new specification. Think of the people who actually have to lay out pages!

Today is NOT a good day to die.

[ScentCone]

When was the last time you even saw a computer that had IE5 on it?

So, I've got a client that runs an e-commerce site. At least a couple hundred orders per day. I did a quick dig into today's stats. So far: 4 orders from people running IE5, and one from a Netscape 4 flavor. All appeared to be on dial-up connections. A little over $1600 worth of business in those 5 orders. These are orders for non-essential items, which suggests disposable income that COULD go into a computer upgrades, broad-band connections, etc. for those shoppers, but which have not. I absolutely guarantee that my client would rather have today's business from those 5 customers than have whatever liberty may come from being able to leverage current formatting fanciness/compatibility. Their site renders just fine in every browser to date, and that $1600 is in the bank, instead of that of a CSS-ed-to-the-hilt, hipper-than-thou competitor. Someday the numbers of legacy users will drop low enough to warrant the change, but $1600 before lunchtime says today's not the day.