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Finally We Get New Elements In HTML 5
An anonymous reader writes "Pure HTML enhancements hardly grew at all in the last eight years. Forward motion basically stopped in 1999 with HTML 4. Now the future looks bright. Recently, HTML has come back to life with HTML 5. Tons of new elements will be available for structure (article, nav, section, etc.), block semantic elements (aside, figure, dialog), and several other functions."
More tags for browsers to neglect to implement!
On a slightly more serious note, it sounds like they're giving up on having most browsers support CSS styling of XML, and just adding new tags that serve no point other than being CSS targets. Semantically, what's the difference between:
<div class="article">...</div>
And:
<article>...</article>
Answer: Nothing. One is easier to type and less verbose, and the CSS selector rule saves a single character.
I thought xhtml was the next iteration after html 4, has that been changed?
On the one hand I welcome new tags like datagrid and menu, which will make HTML source easier to handle. Even though the increased complexity will make it harder to start with HTML. Most web developers still have problems with XHTML/CSS, advancing HTML will make that worse.
Most likely this will lead to more automatically generated code, which in the long run (in combination with XML compliance) should lead to less buggy web pages and general browser compatibility. Which is a good thing. But somehow I think that one of the reasons HTMLs use has become so widespread (Microformats etc.) is simply because it was so easy to mess around with. Making it "better" might slow down innovation in these areas, which would be sad.
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Years from now, are we still going to see IE 10, Firefox 5, and Safari 3.1 support deprecated tags? (Or is it depreciated? Defecated?)
It's like slapping on a shiny new paint job on your car, but the back seat is still full of old McDonald's bags.
One thing that should have been covered long ago in HTML but in fact stil requires CSS is vertical writing (such as in Asian languages). It's suprisingly difficult to guarantee correct display for any browser, even though word processors have had this essential feature for years.
You beat me to it...
Actually, seriously, one really serious omission from HTML and other "generic" markups which can be read widely is proper support for rendering of mathematical equations. It would be very useful for a lot of us if there was native HTML support for at least some of the more basic mathematical language that's contained in everything which gets written from day to day.
The structure based nature of TeX and its variants seems self-evidently superior to that provided by HTML even with the various enhancements which have been retrofitted in recent incarnations and add-ons. Whilst TeX equally clearly isn't the right answer for generic web based content (and, indeed, it would be preferable not to have a standard which requires multiple parses to render anything useful) it seems that HTML really isn't what is needed and the more variations and versions that get implemented the more confusion there will be -- and the more deviation from these standards.
That HTML is already ubiquitous doesn't seem a sufficiently good reason to insist that every new markup language should be a direct superset with ever more variations and multiple ways of achieving the same end. To start with, there's no future in a structure-based approach which makes it so easy to directly change the appearance of content -- think hold much easier it is to write in bold in HTML than it is to indicate that emphasis is required....
What I think is needed, and surely must emerge sooner or later, is a no markup language based more on TeX and professional typesetting approaches than HTML which actually does things properly....
HTML5 is being developed hand-in-hand with XHTML5, which is merely the XML serialization of HTML5. Don't worry. You don't have to give up <br /> if you don't want to.
That being said, I do believe that CSS still has fundamental problems that not even CSS3 seems to be solving, such as taking into consideration the growing use of HTML as an application framework rather than a document framework. The most notable issue of this would be the inability to center an object vertically in a viewport without Javascript to determine its size, which is a klutzy hack at best. The float: and clear: primitives, as you mention, are also comparatively weak (since you can't just float an element, have text flow around it, AND position it vertically), though CSS3 is introducing a Multi-column layout module. There are other issues too, but I can't pull them off the top of my head at this time.
+5 insightful? WTF? This is the same kind of specious reasoning that leads to such gems as "everything that can possibly be invented has been invented."
With the one exception of Microsoft letting IE rot for 7 years, the advancement of the web has been steady and rapid. Even while IE was a thorn in our side, we were able to drop support for NS4, then IE5, then IE5.5. Firefox and Safari continually pushed the envelope of standards support. Javascript toolkits proliferated, bridging the gap between implementations. Even 5 years ago, using CSS for site layout was a much more difficult proposition than it is today.
Now, if you had actually read the article, you would see that some of these tags provide very common functionality that currently require a mess of tag soup, CSS, and/or javascript. <video> and <audio> tags for instance, or <progress>. Sure you can't use them now, but in 10 years everyone will use them, and they'll be horrified with what we used to have to do. There's no reason to stop progress just because a handful of browser makers and lethargic standards bodies haven't yet perfected the first de-facto cross-platform, cross-media information platform in human history.