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W3C Publishes First Public Working Draft of HTML 5

Posted by Zonk on from the new-coat-of-shellack dept.

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."

4 of 310 comments (clear)

  1. 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".

    --
    THL phish sticks
  2. 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.

  3. Re:Still sloppy by hixie · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  4. Re:Not again by hixie · · Score: 5, Informative

    Most of HTML5 was actually done outside of the W3C.

    However, to address your earlier point, one of the big things we're doing with HTML5 is we're going and specifying the bits that all the other specs avoided, like 'window', like 'setTimeout', like how to parse HTML in the face of errors, and so on, and saying exactly how they should work, based on how browsers do them now, so that we can get the browsers to converge on one interoperable set of behaviours.

    I'm also working on the Acid tests, e.g. Acid2 and Acid3, to foster interoperability on the older specs. It's working pretty well so far.

    http://ln.hixie.ch/
    http://www.webstandards.org/action/acid3

    So... HTML5 should actually help bring the browsers closer on the bits that weren't specified before, and the Acid tests are directly intended to do that with the bits that _were_ specified before. If you want to help out, please do -- see the links above for how to help with Acid3, and the links below for how to help with HTML5:

    http://blog.whatwg.org/w3c-restarts-html-effort