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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."
"And xhtml also sucks for hand-coded pages since it is full of redundant closing tags, for things like
, , , li, and so on. It's only more typing and more obfuscating syntactic sugar."
But that's exactly the point, you're suggesting the browser should simply guess where to end blocks, that breeds ambiguity when there's no set way to decide where a specific block should end, browsers simply have to make a best guess and when different browsers guess differently then well, you get fucked up pages on some browsers.
I'm not really sure how explicity declaring the end of a block in any way obfuscates the code, it makes it much clearer as you can see rather easily where a specific block ends. Of course if you correctly indent your tags then matching up start and end tags is plenty easy enough.
"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."
But that's an impossible task without a strict ruleset, if there's no set way to do things then how can each browser vendor possibly know how they should be implementing things? I don't see learning the exact strict rules as that big a deal as they're pretty simple and certainly if you understand CSS, there's absolutely no reason you wouldn't be able to understand XHTML's strict syntax, the very fact it has less tags that are redundant with CSS (i.e. underline, bold etc.) means if anything it's easier than things like HTML5 where you seemingly have to find a specific tag for many things such articles and video but not quite everything so you still have to mangle CSS in as well, it leads to your presentation code being horribly mangled in with your content.
"HTML 5 will add new useful features. XHTML adds nothing that wasn't already possible in HTML 4.01-strict"
You mean apart from the very fact that it's eXtensible without any real limitations? I'd say that's a pretty big bonus. Currently HTML 5 defines lots of new things such as video and sound, but what happens if something new comes along, like 3D stuff or something related to touch computing for example? Do we have to wait until they ratify a new HTML spec like HTML 6 or HTML 5.1? With XHTML the industry can bring forth it's own solution an awful lot quicker than any HTML standards comittee will ever be able to.
"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."
No, that's not the case, the whole point of HTML is you have the loose structure and the content defined in the XHTML with the presentation defined in the CSS, with a handheld device you may simply ignore the CSS or apply your own to present it in a format best suited to your device. With HTML 5 you have presentation embedded inside the HTML itself and so you have to either ignore specific tags which can be troublesome if matching end tags aren't included (see my first point in this post), it is more resource intensive and it makes it harder to apply a device specific presentation layer (stylesheet) if other presentation is already declared in the body of the document.
It goes further than personal home pages too, HTML 5 web applications are going to be an absolute nightmare to maintain for large businesses if they end up finding they're pretty much forced to adopt it. If you have a content management system and you have a web team responsible for ensuring a corporate standard for the site is met in terms of presentation and layout then the last thing you want is for your employees to be able to randomly change font settings and so forth by including inline tags - you may as well let them free on your stylesheets!