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W3C Publishes First Public Working Draft of HTML 5
Lachlan Hunt writes "Today W3C announced that the HTML Working Group has published the first public working draft of HTML 5 — A vocabulary and associated APIs for HTML and XHTML. It's been over 9 months since the working group began in March 2007 and this long awaited milestone has finally been achieved. '"HTML is of course a very important standard," said Tim Berners-Lee, author of the first version of HTML and W3C Director. "I am glad to see that the community of developers, including browser vendors, is working together to create the best possible path for the Web..." Some of the most interesting new features for authors are APIs for drawing two-dimensional graphics, embedding and controlling audio and video content, maintaining persistent client-side data storage, and for enabling users to edit documents and parts of documents interactively.' An updated draft of HTML 5 differences from HTML 4 has also been published to help guide you through the changes."
I can't be the only one who thinks the W3C is annoying as hell... So you're advocating holding back progress because a lot of sites authors don't bother to make their HTML compliant? With the new APIs, this hardly qualifies as "no reason at all".
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Large for-profit software giants must constantly make product to stay in business, pay programmers, and make profit...even if there's nothing REALLY to fix. Just make upgrades...sell new versions.
Consumers and businesses are constantly put on an upgrade-treadmill as older products are purposely torpedoed...even when they worked fine and did the job they needed to do.
now replace "for-profit software giants" with "design-by-committee standards organization" and "stay in business, pay programmers, and make profit" with "stay in charge and not have to get real jobs".
THL phish sticks
And I must say, I like where this is going so far. It feels like a very natural progression from HTML4's ideology, while respecting authors' collective recent interests, such as media embedding, and .
I wonder what the support for HTML 1-4.0 was before 4.1 came out. I bet it was less than total. Standards support for HTML 4.1 is pretty damned good when you look at the big picture. The standard is only not followed (even in IE) for very few features when you look at the entire standard. Full support of HTML 4.1 isn't even a requirement to start on 5. Why would we wait for everybody to finish 4.1 then say "ok, now that you are done with that, lets go do something completely different that will make all of your former work obsolete."
HTML 5 will make it so we don't have to do crazy shit to tease the functionality we want out of a standard that wasn't meant to do what we have come to expect from websites.
So we have
At the start of every HTML document served with an text/html mime type? That's real rational. Let's get this tidied up once and for all and start html documents with
Is that such a difficult concept?
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
"Implementations that use ECMAScript to implement the APIs defined in this specification must implement them in a manner consistent with the ECMAScript Bindings for DOM Specifications specification, as this specification uses that specification's terminology. [EBFD]"
Their language indicates that ECMAScript isn't a requirement. Essentially, "if you use it, you must implement it in a certain way". They don't mention requirements for implementations that don't use ECMAScript.
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Good to see they're binning frames.
But - why has there never been an include mechanism in HTML?
title says it all really. basically they are not going for a default of ogg for audio and video by the looks of it...
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
XML's syntax sucks. It's annoyingly verbose, and annoyingly lowercase (lowercase tags suck because they are harder to tell from normal text). I'm glad they're supporting HTML syntax.
On top of that, we get decent application controls such as grids, trees, better lists, and meters.
Though audio and video I can live without. I'll be the first to get rid of it in my user CSS.
Oh, and I hope they know what they're doing by removing CENTER. Currently, there's no way to replicate its behaviour from CSS (CSS2). (And no, text-align: center ain't the same.)
I was about to say 13256278887989457651018865901401704640, but it appears this number is private property.
use CSS classes (for example ), define the look on a separate CSS file, and let the browser do its work and cache the CSS, you will reduce bandwith this way
If anyone involved in the spec reads this, for the love of god PLEASE include a 'value' on the "select" tag.
'as an alternative to flagging an option tag with selected="selected", a select tag may have a 'value' attribute. A renderer should select the first child option with a matching value attribute.'
Please, my servers are getting fed up with rendering an entire country list just to flag one with selected="selected".
Something I found interesting is that they will not consider the spec complete until there are two fully working implementations (FTFA).
Which sounds rather self-defeating to me; why would a group or company put in a lot of effort implementing the most difficult parts of the recommendation, if W3C explicitely reserves the right to change the spec under them any time before you're done?
If your using the style attribute for everything, your missing the point of CSS...
<style type="text/css">
table.align_left td{
text-align:left;
}
</style>
<table class="align_left">
<tr>
<td>Look a left aligned cell</td>
<td>Look a left aligned cell</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Look a left aligned cell</td>
<td>Look a left aligned cell</td>
</tr>
</table>
To (hopefully) anyone who understands and advocates XHTML and CSS, HTML5 is a tragic mistake. I can't believe TBL is supporting this garbage. It brings back some (but not all: <i> and <b>, but not <u>) presentational tags and gives them worthless definitions. It's full of concessions to lazy/unskilled developers. It makes XML compliance optional. It's full of niche tags which are so narrowly focused (aside, dialog) that they're almost certainly doomed to lousy browser support. It doesn't address the current inadequacies of forms. It has tons of design flaws and inconsistencies.
Until there are consequences for not following the standards, it doesn't matter what the W3C does: People will continue to make pages and sites that are "just good enough", and browsers will continue to render what they want how they want. In the past, now, and for the foreseeable future, there's no incentive for anyone to do things right other than ego.
I don't get it. The people designing this stuff are supposed to be experts in the field, yet they seem hell bent on force feeding everyone this drivel. If their true goal is the hurl the web into chaos, then they will certainly succeed.
I didn't see anything new for uploading files. It would be great if improved support for uploads could be considered. Currently uploading 10 files requires 10 file widgets and performing the browse/select process for each one. It would be nice if the kind of interface found on sites like facebook for uploading multiple images/files could be achieved without the need for Flash or Java.
Hey working group! Use CSS to pick a font. Give a method to get the various metrics of a layed out string and one to draw it. That will cover most uses.
Actually most specs at the W3C don't use this model, which is what explains a lot. :-)
But yeah, like with software development, you have to fix bugs when you find them, and you rarely find the bugs before actually trying to use the software (or in this case, the spec).
The alternative to trial and error when creating a spec is just error.
...then you should configure your browser to do that. I, on the other hand, don't want that -- and I shouldn't have to fight the author to get what I want either.