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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 don't really keep up with the politics, but I think that HTML 5 is the W3C caving to exactly the sentiment that you are expressing. People weren't happy with the W3C and their pushing of standards that people weren't following (or at least not uniformly). They responded to outside pressure and HTML5 was born. So cut them some slack - they have seen the light and are attempting to be accommodating.
Anyway, the situation that you describe won't really be the case in a few years. Safari, Opera, Mozilla, and IE are all fairly standards-compliant these days. When IE6 decreases to 10% or so, the last of the really non-compliant browsers will be history.
Getting your site pixel-perfect on all of them is not and never will be trivial, because HTML is not supposed to do that. Certain sites do demand that, and for those sites we have things like Flash.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Something I found interesting is that they will not consider the spec complete until there are two fully working implementations (FTFA). Sounds good to me... the spec can be trimmed if no one is going to implement the full thing (so at least there will be a smaller spec to refer to instead of a complete spec that no one uses). Another good effect is that if MS drags their feet, they will look even more stupid :)
Actually originally we wanted to remove the DOCTYPE altogether, and since the start tag is optional that would have made the boilerplate "" (the empty string), or "" if you want to include the start tag. Unfortunately, in non-HTML5 browsers, if there's no DOCTYPE, you'll get quirks mode, which we wanted to avoid. That's why we went with the shortest string we could find that triggered standards mode, namely "".
I agree that it's not ideal, but I couldn't really see a way around it.
No more style attributes on any element.
*blink*
Idiocy. Abso-fucking-lute idiocy.
This by itself nearly renders in-browser dhtml applications (ajax or no) non-complaint and broken.
Somebody really needs to wrench the HTML spec out of the hands of the W3C and place it into the hands of somebody who spends a little time on other side of the ivory towers.
Ed R.Zahurak
You know, oblivion keeps looking better every day.
Indeed.
HTML 5 is probably the worst thing that can happen to the web right now, slowly but surely XHTML compliance was bringing together browsers and sites, you only have to look at the magnificent jump in compatibility of sites from IE6 and Firefox 1 to IE7 and Firefox 2, whilst far from ideal still, developing Standards compliant code for the latest generation of browsers is much less of a headache than it's ever been.
HTML 5 increases ambiguity, it's a language seemingly designed for the MySpace generation - people who just want to hack together quick and dirty sites without any care or thought for scalability and accessibility. The simplification of XHTML over HTML whereby ambiguity is decreased by fixed rules, and less presentation tags was absolutely fantastic for developing sites that work on a variety of user agents as much more is left for the user agent to figure out so that small handheld devices could finally display compliant sites in a way that best fit the screen. Accessibility software such as screen readers have a much easier time as they could largely ignore CSS and stick to reading out the actual content without worry that some random presentation tags with a non-strict syntax was going to bugger up the parsing.
The most important concept with XHTML was separation of presentation from content coupled with a strict syntax and HTML 5 goes against these two extremely important points for ensuring we have a clean, standardised, accessible web. It's also quite a problem that HTML 5 says "Oh you don't have to use this or that, you can do it was you want", a standard needs to make up it's fucking mind not sit on the fence because otherwise it's not much of a standard as you get people doing things in many different ways, some of which are undoubtedly going to break in some user agent or another.
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. Instead of dumbing down the underlying language and breaking the web as a result, we should be producing better tools for working with the existing language keeping the web clean without leaving it difficult to publish to.
Do we really want to prolong the old situation of sites that only work or look differently with some browsers and that are inaccesible to people with special accessibility requirements? Not to mention that aren't scalable as content and presentation get mangled into one and hence really aren't maintainable either?
Versioning is basically meaningless on the Web. Browser vendors (other than Microsoft, at least) have repeatedly said that they don't want to have multiple code paths for features, which means that they want each version of HTML to work the same as each previous version. Same for CSS, same for the DOM APIs.
If every version of HTML is going to be identical from the browser's point of view, why bother including any versioning information in there at all?
As far as validators go: the point of validators is to report errors. When HTML6 comes out, if there are things in HTML6 that are errors that aren't errors in HTML5, that presumably means we found bugs in the HTML5 spec, and so it is more helpful to authors if we report them than if we don't. Therefore validators should always validate against the latest spec (unless manually configured otherwise, of course), and the validators don't need a version number in the format.
Having version numbers in formats makes people do stupid things, like make behaviour depend on the version flag. Not having a version number in the format makes people notice that kind of mistake more (since then explicit flags have to be invented to make the mistake, instead of just using the version number in the format).