Is It Time for a 'Kinder, Gentler HTML'?

jg21 writes "Via the Web 2.0 Journal, a worthy link to Yahoo! Architect and JSON inventor Douglas Crockford's latest ideas to fix HTML. He's categorically not a fan of HTML 5, which is still just an Editor's Draft and not endorsed by W3C yet. Crock puts forward ten ideas that in his view would provide extensibility without complexity, adding that the simplification of HTML he is proposing would reduce the cost of training of web developers and incorporates the best practices of AJAX development. From the article: 'The problems with HTML will not be solved by making it bigger and more complicated. I think instead we should generalize what it does well, while excising features that are problematic. HTML can be made into a general application delivery format without disrupting its original role as a document format.'"

Comments

Not Impressed

[AKAImBatman]

You can read his proposal in full over here: http://www.crockford.com/html/

Make sure you have about 2 minutes to spare. You're going to need about that long to read it from beginning to end. What you'll probably find is that he hasn't really solved any of the major issues plaguing HTML or even thought through many of the problems and use-cases that HTML 5 is trying to solve. In fact, his entire "design" can be summed up with the following sentence: "Let's get rid of HTML features that I believe cause problems."

Meanwhile, he still leaves the problems of consistent parsing, semantic meaning, multimedia presentation, and a whole host of other issues unaddressed. Which means that his "design" fails to compete with the intended purpose of HTML 5 at even the most basic level.

I have the highest respect for Mr. Crockford, but my opinion is that he should study the reasons behind HTML 5 a bit more carefully, as well as solicit a bit more feedback from the community before attempting to push a non-solution to their problems. Best of luck to him. :-)

Re:Not Impressed

[suv4x4]

I think you may be mistaking a page of conceptual ideas for a complete design. Even if the submitted article tries to pass it off as such, these are just a set of proposals that Crockford has been discussing. This particular page is more of a list than anything; it does not contain his entire concept or justification. He does a great job of discussing some of these things in person.

Yet, if I was involved in the HTML5 drafts I'd be insulted. He does dismiss an actual complete design (HTML5), in favor of few vague niceties and abstract wishes that don't change the big picture even a bit.

Does it really matter so much if we'll use DOCTYPE or version="5" attribute to specify the document type?

HTML5 is trying to prepare the web to handle robust web applications, and he's there dissing it and saying "let's instead just drop some legacy features, put some syntactic sugar on it and call it a day".

Re:Not Impressed

[AKAImBatman]

Who modded this guy insightful? I'm not sure who he's referring to by "A person involved with WHATWG and HTML5", but it sure as heck can't be me. As I mentioned above, I am not "involved" in it in HTML 5 any official capacity. All I did was go to their website and signed up for the mailing list so I could get spammed on a daily basis! (Ostensibly to "keep track" of their progress and ensure that my needs as a developer are met. ;-))

"[R]eads this and gets upset". Again, who is he talking about? This hardly sounds "upset":

I have the highest respect for Mr. Crockford, but my opinion is that he should study the reasons behind HTML 5 a bit more carefully, as well as solicit a bit more feedback from the community before attempting to push a non-solution to their problems. Best of luck to him. :-)

?

Now for some real fun. JSON vs XML... go!

Here's an amazing answer for you: Each has its advantages and disadvantages. Evaluate your project needs before choosing a solution.

Seriously, you mods need to lay off the crack. Or at least share with the rest of us. :-P

Re:Not Impressed

[m2943]

In particular, their treatment of some Asian glyphs has some folks absolutely up in arms (cf. Han unification) and it falls short of what I'd call truly 'universal.'

The "controversy" about Han unification is inane nationalistic posturing on the part of those Asian nations; it has no basis in either linguistics or practice. It's as if every European nation wanted their own codes for the Roman alphabet.

Start mandating UTF-8 and you're going to have people breaking the standard in favor of national charsets faster than you can say "cultural imperialist."

"Han unification" is not "cultural imperialism", it's simply applying the same design principles to Chinese characters that were applied to other languages. People object to Han unification for a variety of reasons, most of them related to nationalism, arrogance, or simply ignorance. For example, there are lingering animosities between Japan and China. And many traditionalists in Asia think of the West as inferior and would have found grounds for objecting to any character set not designed domestically.

The technically correct thing to do is to keep Han unification, just like all other scripts are unified, and address problems with specific glyphs as they come up.

Re:Not Impressed

[m2943]

Mandating "UTF-8 only" is a very English-centric way of thinking of the problem.

No, it is not. Unicode was developed by an international group of experts, including plenty of participants from Asia. It represents a reasonable and practical compromise between lots of different design goals. Everybody had to make some sacrifices there. People like you are just trying to rattle people's cages by turning a technical issue into a nationalistic one. "GB 18030" is a China-centric standard, Unicode is a global and neutral standard.

Furthermore, to the degree that there are problems with Unicode and Asian languages, the way to address them is to fix Unicode, not for each Asian nation to fall back to some national character set.

Of course, there are plenty of political and economic incentives for nations like China and Japan to try to have their own national character sets; hopefully, organizations like the UN and WTO will recognize this for what it is: attempts at content control and attempts at erecting illegal trade barriers, and deal with it accordingly.

"Kinder Gentler," What the Hell Is That?

[eldavojohn]

As an engineer, the words "kinder gentler" don't mean much to me. I mean, they do when you're talking about other things like leaders or puppies but what the hell do those attributes have to do with a communication standard like HTML?

From the part of the proposal entitled "That's It" I learn:

These changes significantly improve the reliability, security, and performance of HTML applications. The simplification of the language reduces the cost of training of web developers. It incorporates the best practices of Ajax development. It provides extensibility without complexity. The deltas from HTML 4 are generalizations and reductions, which should make browser implementation more straightforward. This is particularly important for mobile devices that cannot tolerate the power demands of complex platforms. The only new feature here is the module, which is critical for security. Modules makes safe mashups possible. So what I'm reading here is you think these changes make it more "straightforward mobile-friendly?"

I am by no means an expert on this but I do code web applications for a living. I will tell you that these changes do not necessarily "improve reliability, security and performance" of HTML. You are suggesting changes with mobile devices in mind and the developers in mind. Adding another getElementsByTagName method to Javascript will make it easier for developers but over use of that will only make searching the DOM more intensive and lead to worse performance. And remember the original intent of HTML! If you are complaining that mobile devices can't render what a desktop can, perhaps it's time to look at a mobile-HTML standard and either you put a cross translator on the mobile browsers or you entice developers to make two sites. I'm not opposed to these ideas, I just don't see how they're going to really help anything but the specific users this guy has in mind. They certainly wouldn't help me at all or provide a better user experience for my end users.

This is ridiculous. You are attacking the wrong target here, you should be attacking the browsers that don't behave according to standards like the cowboy Internet Explorer browser that sometimes does whatever it wants. Many nights I have spent hacking code that checks what browser is being run and behaves differently because it's Internet Explorer and not "everybody else."

Also, a bit offtopic but I Googled "kinder gentler" in an attempt to understand its meaning and for some reason the first result was the White House page for George Herbert Walker Bush. What the hell?

Re:"Kinder Gentler," What the Hell Is That?

[Anonymous Coward]

As an engineer, the words "kinder gentler" don't mean much to me. I mean, they do when you're talking about other things like leaders or puppies but what the hell do those attributes have to do with a communication standard like HTML?

Easy to use. Forgiving.

Compare YAML (and JSON) to XML, S-Expressions, or (shudder) HTML. YAML's syntax can be stated clearly in about 20 lines of text. JSON's syntax is a subset of that. And yet, YAML is very forgiving. XML requires dozens (or is it hundreds) of pages. HTML requires waaaay more. S-Exps have a nice syntax, but are not forgiving. It uses many parentheses and can grow to become difficult to read. I know which I would rather work with.

Re:"Kinder Gentler," What the Hell Is That?

[Anonymous Coward]

But, you know, it's always nice to karma-whore by ripping IE. Sure, IE development may make extra work for you -- but then again, you're being paid for that work. Why not be happy that "that cowboy Internet Explorer" helped you find gainful employment? Nobody who's ever suffered through the demon that is IE would say that. You know, there's a reason I (and my coworkers) hate it, apparently you just think we hate it because it's fun.

You know, it's fun to finish a javascript method in Firefox with Firebug there to help you debug and step through it. You think it's fun to watch IE bitch about only God knows what and not work. Or simply not show anything at all if you're trying to evoke a method on a javascript object that isn't valid. No feedback, just ... nothing.

Keep your mouth shut about karma whoring unless you have had to suffer through this stuff. I'll post this anonymously to prove I don't give a damn about karma when I know what it's like to have to deal with that shit day after day. I have a job to do, I put in overtime I'm not paid for and a lot of the time it's so I make the schedule work. Almost every single time I have had to devote time specifically for IE and it's bullshit "do whatever we want" mentality. There are standards out there that make sense. Please, for the love of God, use them. I'd rather be using my time doing something productive than thinking about a round about hack to fix a problem--that I already have a solution for--and it often just looks ugly and is barely maintainable.

Market forces screwed up HTML

[athloi]

HTML was never perfect. Then the standards people took too long to update it.

Netscape and then Microsoft added custom HTML.

At this point, the browser became written to execute bad code well...

Now we've got cross-browser headaches and standards confusion.

I say bring on HTML 5, and bring on the strict. Make it look good in both browsers. End the sheer boredom of trying to make code display well on FireFox and IE, both of which are bloated pieces of crap, when it works just fine in Opera.

Simplify, and abstract, but don't expect HTML coders to be coders... it's a language for layout for the rest of us, and its genius has always been its simplicity and adaptability.

HTML is DEAD

[OxFF52]

...or at least will play a much less significant role in the future.

As a document format, HTML is great... for example, I throw in a few tags in this forum to create bold, italics, links, etc. Throw in tables and images an you can create a very nice looking article for the web.

However, there is a huge difference between "documents" which can be read in various different monitor/browser sizes, fonts, and languages and what a majority of paid developers do with HTML within corporations. That being creating pixel perfect applications that work in one particular browser (IE or Firefox).

To that end, what we need isn't yet another HTML specification which will make the browsers even that much more bloated and incompatible with each other... it is an application framework for the web. In fact, this is what Adobe and Microsoft are creating with Flex/AIR and Silverlight, respectively. Ultimately, the "markup language" of the future will be dynamically created and compiled on the server and sent to the browser in a binary format which is run by a plug-in.

Therefore, I believe HTML should evolve into what is started out as... a DOCUMENT format. It should really move towards a light-weight Open Document specification, NOT towards something that attempts to embody "Web 2.0" features which are already evolving well beyond dated HTML specifications that are nearly a decade old.