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Finally We Get New Elements In HTML 5

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the not-so-patiently-waiting dept.

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."

4 of 378 comments (clear)

  1. Excellent! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  2. So do tags ever deprecate? by lonechicken · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  3. Do we really need to stop progress? by telbij · · Score: 4, Interesting

    +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.

  4. Re:what happened to xhtml? by jalefkowit · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Yes. Kind of.

    There are currently to Working Groups in the W3C working on markup -- the XHTML working group, and the HTML working group. These are separate entities with separate memberships and separate processes.

    XHTML was originally intended to be the successor to HTML. But a couple of things that happened after XHTML1 "shipped" caused that to be re-evaluated:

    • The whole point of XHTML was that moving to XML syntax would open up new possibilities for user-agents: not just browsers (whose lives would be simplified by not having to deal with "tag soup" anymore"), but applications that would take advantage of already knowing XML to do cool stuff with the web. Only that never really happened; and because Microsoft wasn't on board, browser vendors still had to parse the "tag soup" anyway.
    • The XHTML Working Group went off the deep end and announced that XHTML2 would handle errors the way XML parsers are supposed to: by shutting down and throwing up an "Non-conforming document" error. Needless to say, this is not how the Web works today, and it threw a scare into millions of Web publishers who incorporate third-party content that they have no control over (like, say, ads) in their sites. They also proposed major changes to the syntax of XHTML2 versus XHTML1 to clean it up and make it more logical; which sounds great until you realize that now you have to teach those millions of web publishers a whole new syntax or their sites break.

    When it became clear that continuing down the XHTML path promised tons of heartburn for publishers and user-agent developers without much reward in return, people started thinking that maybe rebooting the HTML specification process wouldn't be such a bad thing. The W3C picked up the WHATWG's independent "HTML5" spec as a starting point, and that's where we are today: XHTML is for people who are comfortable with radical changes between versions of the spec and Draconian error processing; HTML is for people who want backwards compatibility and less strict parsing.

    --

    Read my blog.