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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."

7 of 310 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Not again by nacturation · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Yes, let's roll out another new standard for no reason at all when most of the web still hasn't caught up to the last one.

    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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  2. The treadmill.... by gandhi_2 · · Score: 5, Insightful
    I have this theory...some of you might too....

    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".

  3. Still sloppy by nagora · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "The DOCTYPE declaration is <!DOCTYPE html> and is case-insensitive in the HTML syntax."

    So we have

    <!DOCTYPE html><html>

    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

    <HTML version='xxxx'>

    Is that such a difficult concept?

    TWW

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  4. Someone hire this guy! by nacturation · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Looks like this is what Mozilla, Apple, Microsoft, etc will need to begin supporting 5 in the future. I think they should hire you for your keen insight.

    How long that takes, noone really knows. Another stunning peek into the future.

    More importantly, how easy will this be to use and how useful will the semantic bindings be? It'll be as easy to use as a snowboard and as useful as a hammer.

    Finally, anyone know if HTML5 mandates any specific version of EMCA/Java-Script? That part seemed vague to me. A three second scan of the linked article yields:

    "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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  5. Still no value on select tags? by dumbo11 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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".

  6. HTML5 is the wrong path by Dracos · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:HTML5 is the wrong path by hankwang · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Essentially what's happened with HTML 5 is we've got a language that caters for those incapable of working with a well structured language, on one hand this is great because more people can publish to the web, on the other it's awful as it basically fucks up the web further.

      As far as I understand, HTML 5 specifies exactly how a user agent should deal with formally incorrect code. I have never understood some people's obsession with XHTML, where a compliant browser is supposed to display an error message. With Opera, I encounter "XHTML" pages every now and then that do not display at all because they were dynamically generated from a database and there is a single illegal character in there or a forgotten close tag in a string coming from a database. How is that supposed to help anyone that every scripted page needs to be tested against every possible input condition? It could have been made optional in the user-agent to display a warning for web developers, but no, the spec requires that the browser justs bails out.

      And xhtml also sucks for hand-coded pages since it is full of redundant closing tags, for things like <br>, <tr>, <td>, <li, and so on. It's only more typing and more obfuscating syntactic sugar. There are millions of people who create web content, and only a handful browsers. To me it is obvious that it is a waste of manpower to require of millions of people to learn the exact strict xhtml rules rather than make the browsers more flexible with non-conformant input, in a well-defined cross-browser portable manner. HTML 5 will add new useful features. XHTML adds nothing that wasn't already possible in HTML 4.01-strict (the version without font/frameset/bgcolor/etc. stuff).

      [with xhtml] small handheld devices could finally display compliant sites in a way that best fit the screen.

      I think you are talking about spacer GIFs and table markup. As far as I know, you can still abuse tables for page layout in XHTML. Moreover, to make a page that is really portable between 1024 pixel monitors and devices with a 150 pixel-wide screen requires much more than just xhtml/css; both the CSS and the page structure need to be carefully designed to be portable, in a way that is not enforced by the xhtml spec.