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W3C Considering An HTML 5
An anonymous reader writes "When the decision was initially made to move in the direction of XHTML, instead of a new version of HTML proper, it seemed like a good idea. Years later and the widespread adoption of CSS (among other things) has proven that things don't always develop the way we expect. As a result, HTML 5 has been revived by the W3C. After some lobbying and continued work by the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group, the old web markup language is getting an official face-lift. A post to the Webforefront blog explains the history behind the initial decision to move to XHTML, and why things are so different in the here and now."
Because what the world really needs right now is another version of a web standard which has had hardly any full, correct implementations in any version that's ever existed.
Or are the W3C just trying to justify their existence?
TFA makes several great points about how this seeming sentiment of "we'll stick with the HTML we know and love" is more an unwillingness to change than it is to update a standard. The whole idea of XHTML was to provide a segueway into an altogether new way of distributing content. This really seems a regression more than anything. What does XHTML fail to deliver that would cause WC3 to shy away from the previously hardline (and appropriate, IMHO) stance of "this is the new HTML, get used to it"?
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They can't let HTML die. The W3C would become irrelevant quickly if they stopped tweaking the language. Finally, even nomral users and web surfers have started to use HTML in web forums and MySpace (to usually garish effect, but still. XHTML just doesn't have the portability and ease of use that HTML did for things like forums.
Take Fark for instance. After years and years, a critical mass of people are finally learning a, b, u, i, big, super, img, and other standard tags, most of which just don't work the same or at all under XHTML.
Sadly, many useful old tags probably won't work in HTML 5, or not in any useful fashion. The W3C will most certainly mess with the language to bring it in line with XHTML conventions. They've already taken target="_blank" from us, what other useful gizmos are they going to futz with this time, bookmarks? You can pry my octothorpe from my cold, carpel-tunnel hands.
Sure, CSS is damn useful and nobody generally liked frames. However, everything else about HTML was fine circa 1995. Maybe I'm being an old codger who still writes HTML pages without fancy crap like Frontpage, but I'm getting tired of their self-important crap. Breaking useful conventions just makes trying to communicate on the web that much harder. But, every time I tag font or add target="_blank", I do think about the W3C. Maybe that was just their goal all along.
Second, I wonder about this "hardline" approach. Who made the W3C gods of the internet? I mean, things need to be standardized, but they refused to do their job and standardize, and guess what, the industry got together and made another standardization board which was mentioned in the OP. The W3C can't hardline anything... they just format the direction we're going... they don't choose it, the industry does that.
Go ahead, think I'm wrong, think the W3C should just stick it to all those web developers and browser companies that have spent years working around the group that is supposed to make their lives easier. The W3C is a paper tiger... they are completely at the mercy of everyone else. They can't hardline anything, much less something which was being standardized without them anyway.
FanFictionRecs.net
If the standard is "do whatever IE does" then how would Firefox ever actually be able to implement that standard. There is no published documents on how IE functions, so how is Firefox supposed to keep up with that. If Firefox emulated IE 6 perfectly, and then MS released IE7 and completely changed the markup (like they do all the time with their doc format), then Firefox would have to go through a lot of work, trying to figure out what MS was doing. the W3C standards exist because people want to use operating systems other than windows to access the web. They exist because they want to be able to rely on other vendors to provide a web browser that works. If anything I would blame MS for holding everyone back, when we could be creating beautiful webpages very easily, but instead it ends up taking twice as long because we have to deal with all the quirks in IE. Even if no other browsers existed, it would still take this long, because there is no documentation or definition of what IE will do with any give HTML or CSS code.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
After Mosaic faded out, Netscape was the dominant browser, . . . Microsoft IE took over as the dominant browser.
The funny part of that is, Netscape was a re-write of Mosaic by the people who made it in the first place. They did Mosaic as a school project, and then said to themselves, "You know, we could probably make money with this, if we fixed all the things we did wrong!" Mosaic was kept by the University it was written at, then spun off to a company named spyglass, which was bought by Microsoft, and re-named to IE. Thus, Mosaic started the web revolution, Netscape was a side-track, and then Mosaic came back under a different name, with much wealthier owners who could afford more coders to work on it. Netscape of course, tried to keep up with the feature creep, but with less financial backing, and less people working on it, their code soon turned into an un-manageable mess (which is why it was completely scrapped and re-written from scratch for Firefox) - just goes to show that for large projects, maybe those project managers really do serve a purpose.
That of course, is where the problem with browser compatibility really came in - Microsoft wanted more more more features, and they wanted them now now now! So they pushed their developers for speed instead of sanity/security/stability, and that resulted in dumbness like allowing ActiveX to be embedded inside of web pages, and the completely screwball syntax for adding filters to CSS code. Admittedly, some of the things that were added were good, and some were useful (the BGSOUND tag for example, is much easier to control from javascript than the EMBED tag), but the vast majority of the "new features" introduced to IE this way were either pointless, needlessly convoluted for the developer, or just plain harmful. (As the many people who had their bank accounts raided by ActiveX malware, or their computer's power turned off by visiting a prank site will agree.)
Since IE was windows-only for the most part, Microsoft was free to include as many proprietary things as they wanted, slap copywrites, patents, and all sorts of other protections on them, and basically make it impossible for people on other platforms to add those features to their browsers. It's important to remember that in the early days of the internet (when Mosaic and Netscape first came out, and thus when the actual mindset regarding their feature paths was determined), Windows only barely supported internet access at all, and was in the extreme minority of systems on the internet, which were mostly Unix based. (Yes, Microsoft's browser did technically originate on a Unix system, I've used the original first version of Mosaic when it was first released, on a black-and-white X Terminal attached to an SGI Challenge system.) That meant that while Microsoft was free to make things that worked only on their system and call it good, nobody else could get away with it, as most of their userbase would be left behind.
Besides, adding a new spec like HTML 5 will not fix the browser gap - even now, as new technologies are coming out and new standards and specs are being released, the browser developers are still putting their own unique and incompatible spins on how things work. Ever tried to embed video in a web page and have it be completely XHTML compliant? You can do it in Firefox. You can do it in IE too. You just can't do it in both with the same code, because they interpret the specs differently. That has nothing to do with IE needing to support backwards compatibility at all, since backwards compatibility relies on a different set of tags completely. It also has nothing to do with Firefox's developers being immature and combative, since they took the simpler and saner route of the two, which didn't involve ActiveX, or embedding the Microsoft Media Player. (Yes, ActiveX in web pages is still bad, even if it can't get at your bank software or power off register anymore.)
Anyway, the fact remains that it was us who stole
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
"Indeed they do, but in 10 years if every web board declares XHTML strict convention, there's plenty of handy stuff that no longer works, and has no replacement."
Got any examples of what you can't do in XHTML that you can do in HTML? At the end of the day you can always embed CSS directly into your code when using something like a form on a forum using the style attribute, for example:
Blah blah
It ain't good practice, but backwards compatibility isn't necessarily about good practice because sometimes the things you're being backwards compatible with weren't good practice to start with.
Furthermore, you talk about additional functionality being missing from XHTML that's available in HTML but again, this misses one of the core points as to what XHTML is about, the X in XHTML means extensible, XHTML is designed to be a solid core of HTML markup that's embedded in the XML rules, so that any application can define a new doctype with new tags to do new things as needed. HTML doesn't have this option without simply breaking the standard.
Many of your comments also suggest you don't understand the concept and importance of separation of code, content and presentation and what this means. The W3Cs recommendations aren't about creating new standards to stay relevant, they're about pushing standards that improve:
- Accessibility
- Extensibility
- Compatibility
I can't see how this is in any way a bad thing for anyone other than those who simply can't be arsed to spend 10 minutes finding out what's different!
Why bother with allowing the HTML mimetype, if it has no advantages other than it's what was done in the past?
Because XHTML adoption has been slowed by a lack of backwards compatibility: you can't currently deliver XHTML in a standards-compliant way and expect it to work on anything other than a small minority of browsers. Sending the data with content type 'application/xhtml+xml' or whatever confuses the current installed base of internet explorer, making it an extremely bad idea, and probably unusable for general consumption sites for at least the next 5 years. See this excellent article for more reasons why this is a good idea.
Absolutely well-said. I understand all about the principle of separating content from layout, but frankly there's far too much arrogance to go around about HOW to implement that concept.
I fail to see the difficulty. Headings aren't supposed to have a particular default height. What makes this difficult? Browser vendors can simply pick one themselves.
It's trivial. It's a bit more complicated if you are talking about the subset of HTML and CSS that Internet Explorer supports, but there have been established techniques for years.
Part of Apple's philosophy is that applications should be based around the concept of documents, and they've been quite successful with it. A document model is not antithetical to applications.
This is not true. The idea is to use the most appropriate element type. <div> and <span> elements should only be used when there isn't something more suitable.
Please refer to the Rule of Least Power. It has all kinds of implications that make what you are suggesting a much worse idea than a document-based design.
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That's "bastardised", dear boy :-)