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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
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
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