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

Update CSS not XHTML/HTML

[oliverthered]

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.

Re:Update CSS not XHTML/HTML

[drinkypoo]

IMO what we really need in CSS is variables and math. Variables are really key. And to be able to say that the width of an element is n% of the width of another element, even when it is not nested within that elements, is also key - otherwise you have to use javascript for assloads of things. Of course other similar things would be possible. This is absolutely critical. Without it CSS makes life harder in a disturbing number of situations.

Re:Update CSS not XHTML/HTML

[richdun]

Some of that is in the CSS3 and further specs, like the advanced layout module, but those are beyond the reach of even the latest versions of FF, Opera, KHTML, etc. at the moment.

But, really, XHTML 1.1 is a great standard, and instead of moving ahead, let's try to get everyone to use it first. It hasn't been updated in forever (forever in web terms, of course) because the push has been to get everyone to actually use standards, and to get browser support of CSS2 and eventually CSS3 complete across all platforms and engines.

Just glancing over it, the HTML5 standards up at WHATWG worry me slightly. There seems to be a lot fo presentational/non-structural markup sneaking back in. Not necessarily as obvious as some of the older tags that were dropped in HTML4/XHTML1, but still. We have to keep in mind the separation of powers - XHTML/HTML for markup, CSS for presentation, and DOM for scripting - or things will just get way too complicated again.

Make things easier and more accessible for the developer/design? Sure. Add presentational content to HTML so he/she doesn't have to learn how to properly use CSS and the DOM? No. Do this, and it'll open the floodgates for everyone (MSFT) to add "special" tags to further "help" the developer/designers. Next think you know we'll be running around with a bunch of "Works best in ..." graphics like its 1998 again (only this time we'll be using PNGs or JPEG2000s instead of GIFs).

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:The More they add, the less I like

[Bogtha]

I actually find things like "normal <B>bold <I>bold italic</B> italic</I> normal" useful

I hate to break it to you, but that's not HTML 4.01 Transitional either. No version of HTML has permitted overlapping elements in the way that you describe. You are merely exploiting error handling that is fairly common amongst web browsers.

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.

Re:The More they add, the less I like

[Doctor-Optimal]

They can have my blink tag when they pry it from my cold, dead hands!

Re:The More they add, the less I like

[Bogtha]

It's like watching people program without a care about optimizing for size or speed. They're paid by the hour, not for the quality of the code.

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?

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!

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

[nine-times]

I don't really get your complaint. I mean, I share your annoyance with uselessly flashy pages, and literally Flash-y pages, but what's wrong with refining standards? Many of the updates to HTML have made things cleaner, more precise, and more consistent. Some of the added features have allowed web developers to do more with less code (if you can call HTML "code"). Much of what's added in-- if you don't want to use it, don't use it. But if you have some reason to do something flashy on your site, it's probably better to have it be done in some standard way rather than though some hack or by adding Flash to your page.

Re:The More they add, the less I like

[Bogtha]

You prefer writing little-stupid javascript functions to just putting a :hover rule in your CSS?

I get the impression he's not a professional web designer, so he can just ignore stuff like that entirely.

HTML 3.2 is really the only standard the most browsers agree upon

There's a very good reason for that. The W3C were working on HTML 3 when it became apparent that their work was diverging from what browsers understood; browser vendors were adding stuff at a crazy rate while ignoring the HTML 3 work. So the W3C decided to scrap HTML 3 and make a decent description of what browsers understood in HTML 3.2.

Basically, the reason why "most browsers agree upon HTML 3.2" is because HTML 3.2 was merely rubber-stamping what browsers already did.

IE6/7 have all those weird box model problems with XHTML 1.0

There's no such thing as a "box model" in XHTML 1.0. The box model is a feature of CSS.

Forget HTML, it's CSS that's Broken, deal with it

[StreetFire.net]

I WANT A REAL LAYOUT LANGUAGE!!!!!!!!

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!!

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.

Re:Today is NOT a good day to die.

[drix]

Meh. First, you're talking gross. What's his margin on those $1600 worth of orders? If it's "standard" retail, let's say 5%. So $80 bucks a day. Now, how much extra time and effort did it take you, the developer, to support browsers that are almost a decade old and that, by your own admission, affect roughly 2% of the userbase? My guess is at least a couple thousand dollars, unless you adopted a lowest-common-denominator approach, in which case the site must look unappealingly 1997. More importantly, what sort of tradeoffs were you forced to make? Have you studied at all how much business your client is forgoing by not leveraging the current "formatting fanciness"? Here are a couple points to consider.

1. People like sites that are clean looking and easy to use. Marketing studies have consistently shown that people will pay more for the exact same item from a place that sells it in a more aesthetically pleasing manner. (I'm not saying this can't be done with HTML 3.2 or whatever, but it's much harder.)
2. Standards-compliant sites that use semantic markup place higher in search engines, netting more impressions and more sales.
3. Table-based layouts are slow and unresponsive. How many people here remember good old NS 4 sitting there blank-faced, cranking away on the old, complicated table layouts of yore. I do. Responsiveness is huge; people have come to expect it as the rule, not the exception--a marked departure from the dark days of IE5 and NS4.