Slashdot Mirror
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"?
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
Another web standard for microsoft to ignore.
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.
/> at the end.
Um, what? Seriously, the b, u, i and big tags are _exactly the same_ in XHTML. There was never a super element in HTML 4, it's just sup, and it's unchanged. The a tag does everything from HTML 4 the same way in XHTML. The only difference in it is that it's allowed extra attributes.
Out of all of those things, the only one that's changed at all is the img tag, and that's only in two places - first, in XHTML you are required to provide an alt= attribute (instead of just strongly recommended like in HTML 4), and second, you have to close the tag properly, with a
Frames are also still part of the XHTML spec.
The font tag however, is gone and won't be missed any more than the blink tag was, by anyone other than frontpage (which absolutely loves adding thirty or so font tags in a row setting and unsetting the color 'white' from the text.
I have suggested this before and always got shouted down for it... but as a web developer, I really wish they had simply implemented tags like 'date', which the browser would automatically know about as a date field and have its own built-in popup calendar for browsing dates, rather than having to either rely on plain text, lame dropdown menus, or else implementing yet another date popup javascript library (or including yet another javascript library which slows down the user experience even more).
There are so many things that could be included in the html language if it weren't for the purists - dates, columns, real collapsable tree controls, counters, AJAXified controls that work without all the crap you have to do today to detect browsers... but no, the purists say "you can do it in this (incredible convoluted) css" or "you can implement this in javascript" (cue long convoluted "obvious" solution).
Geeks are notorious for generalising and making everything nice and orthogonal, but they often forget that sometimes it's worth having something that makes life easier 90% of the time, even if it's technically possible to reduce it to a set of other constructs that already exist.
Remember lisp, nobody uses it for real-world programming even though it's incredibly powerful. No, we use other languages that have lots of useless and redundant and inflexible syntax that makes the act of everyday programming easier and more straightforward most of the time. Are these inferior languages as powerful, expressive and all-encompassing as lisp? No. Are they easier for 99% of mere mortals to comprehend and use? Yes. If we had tags for controls that reflected the more dynamic nature of the Web today, even if many of those tags could be implemented in javascript, it would make pages smaller and faster 90% of the time (you could still implement it yourself if you really needed additional functionality).
But, as usual, the purists are in control. We're not supposed to use tables for arranging pages; no, we have to use CSS to do that. So now we have a bunch of pages that don't render properly. But do they admit that it was a bad idea? No, it's the browsers' faults for crappy implementations. I don't get it, this religious mindset that says "You must do it one way, our way is the only way". "The TABLE tag is for tabular data only, don't use it for arranging the page". What crap. The table tag is amazingly useful, it works in all browsers, and no I don't mind in the least typing TR and TD everywhere. It's simple and it works. Yes, it's more verbose perhaps than the CSS version but at least it works in all browsers and doesn't end up with overlapping crappy text all over the place.