Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Suggests Carving Up HTML 5
dp619 writes "HTML 5 is extensive and may take years to complete. Microsoft's solution to hasten its development is to carve it up. The company wants to divide HTML 5 into sub-specifications overseen by different working groups. Internet Explorer platform architect Chris Wilson said that HTML 5 features including its Canvas APIs, offline caching of Web applications' resources, persistent client-side data storage, and peer-to-peer (P2P) networking connection framework would be useful outside of HTML. The WC3 seems to be receptive to the idea and says that a consensus is forming among working group members to do just that."
what comes after that again?
Modding Trolls +1 inciteful since 1999
If anyone else were to suggest this approach, you'd all be saying, "Makes sense."
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
WC3? What's that? The Water Closet 3? I think I just found the name for my new band.
Damn that Water Closet Three!
Caveat Utilitor
This is pretty standard for Microsoft. I mean they've always only supported part of the specification. Now, I guess they're making this lack of full support explicit.
In one way though, this is a good thing. If Microsoft says we'll only support sub-specifications A, B, and C, then web developers will have a better idea as to what restrictions they're working under to create cross platform sites. It'd be an improvement over the current system, which seems to consist of coding for one browser, and then going through and testing/experimenting with the other browser to see what's broken.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
Could Microsoft please, possible just leave HTML 5 and XHTML 2 alone, and simply follow the standards produced? Pretty please?
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Everything has to be modular?
Shift happens. Fire it up.
Well, at least now they're being more explicit about their lack of full compliance. Now, when Microsoft says that they "support" a standard, web developers have no idea how much support they're getting. With this, there'll be finer granularity, so Microsoft can say, "We only support subspecifications X, Y, and Z; everything else may not work." This'll make it easier for web developers to see what features they can use while maintaining compatibility with both Internet Explorer and Firefox.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
I think Microsoft should be required to finish WinFS before being trusted with a component of HTML 5.
There are a few risks. The biggest one is if any of the teams slip behind or run ahead of schedule. If that happens, pieces will begin to fall out of sync.
however, the biggest benefit would be to web developers if this goes through as planned. I'd appreciate a properly modularized HTML5 myself.
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
But wasn't part of the point of HTML5 that it would be a single atomic standard rather than a mess of modules where any particular one cannot be relied upon to be supported like with XHTML 1.1?
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Is there still a point to HTML5 then though?
Wouldn't it be better to just take the existing XHTML and extend it seeing as that's the point of XHTML? That it's eXtensible?
On the one hand, I want to say that this sounds reasonable, despite it being suggested by Microsoft.
On the other hand I want to say... WTF?!? Why does a markup language need all that crap anyway? Persistent local storage? What does that have to do with page markup?
I'm not saying that these other things are bad or unnecessary. Just that they shouldn't be part of the HTML spec. Just like CSS and JavaScript are both widely used with HTML, but are defined in their own separate complementary specs.
I suppose the real reason for the kitchen sink approach is pragmatic. As explained in TFA, no one has volunteered to take over individual parts. But if nobody cares enough to commit to that, maybe nobody really cares about the result either and those other parts are unnecessary? I say keep HTML as a markup language, add hooks for other things, and let those other things be specified if and when someone actually cares enough to do it.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
...carving up Microsoft!
You all know it makes sense.
It's a bad idea. Look what happened to the split CSS3.
If you ignore the fact that Microsoft is working on Silverlight, then sure, it makes some sense. In reality Microsoft is working on Silverlight and its motives are suspect.
Win a signed Stephen Carpenter ESP Guitar from the Deftones: http://def-tag.com/?r=0008781
no thanks. save your shit, just for once.
Read radical news here
1) complain about how slow HTML 5 is coming along
2) implement HTML 5 early; broken and unfinished
3) web developers use IE HTML 5
4) even after HTML 5 comes out, most web developers are confused as to the difference between HTML 5 and IE HTML 5
5) non IE web browsers have a tough time implementing HTML 5, and trying to render broken web pages
6) ????
7) Profit!!!
Also, what does Warcraft III have to do with anything?
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
Considering they are a convicted monopoly and seem to be involved in something fishy with standards bodies over OOXML, it is awfully hard to give MS the benefit of the doubt as other posters suggest.
It seems to me that dividing up HTML 5 into different pieces means it will be much harder for a single person trusted by the community to oversee all of their activity. There will be only so many staunch people available. If divided into 5 sections then there might be 5 times as much paperwork. It will favor a giant company that is able to push 5 or 10 times as many people onto the project. If they choose to invest MS could create 5 different blogs and 5 or more FUD streams. It will be like having 5 small countries' standards bodies, each meeting in a disused room in the back of a library, instead of one major sized standards body that will become the sole focus of a massive campaign for transparency and reporting. So while splitting the job into pieces sounds like common sense, actually MS never does anything that is not in their best interest and in this case, while perhaps this might give them earlier targets for eye candy creation products using HTML 5, it will also give them much fatter, less well protected targets of FUD, skullduggery (I mean BRIBE$) and Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. It is a bad idea to do what MS wants in just about every case so far and that is not paranoia, it's called reading the news.
I think dividing the standard up into subsections is a good idea, as it helps keep the specifications small and understandable. Having all that stuffed into one big standard is just asking for trouble. That was part of the problem with the original SGML spec -- it was too freakin' huge to implement easily.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
They are going to change. It's not yet decided exactly how they will change – the HTML WG has Web Forms 2 (an extension of HTML4's forms), and the Forms WG is working on some rough ideas for trying to fit XForms into HTML5, and there is a joint Task Force that is meant to be working things out between the groups but hasn't actually managed to achieve anything yet. (None of the major browser developers has indicated much interest in implementing XForms, whereas Opera has already released an implementation of WF2 and there is some ongoing work to implement parts in Firefox and Safari, so the momentum is currently in that direction.)
Web Forms 2 says "input elements of type hidden may be placed anywhere (both in inline contexts and block contexts)", which sounds like it satisfies your concern (and has the advantage of working in all existing web browsers, unlike a new <state> element).
<table> has never been deprecated, and HTML5 still permits it. (Tables used for layout are not allowed, although that's impossible for an automatic validator to detect). There are already CSS properties that can replace cellpadding ('padding') and cellspacing ('border-spacing').
It seems spec writers usually think that kind of thing should be described in tutorials or other documents, not in the specification. The HTML5 spec is far harder to read than HTML4 (because it's far more detailed, to fix the differences between implementations caused by HTML4's vagueness), so it really needs that kind of user-oriented documentation. The differences document gives a brief mention of what should be used instead of some obsolete features, but it would be nice to have more detail and examples for people who want to move to HTML5.
By the Time Cube logic (four simultaneous days, one in each of four time zones), a stopped clock is right 24 times a day.
You're asking if I'd hand OJ a knife? Am I dating his ex?
Uh, wait...too soon?
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
I'm the editor of HTML5, and I agree entirely with Microsoft here (and they're far from the only people saying this). The problem is that we have very few competent specification editors, and if we did have some, there are literally dozens of specifications that are really important to the Web that need editors. Splitting the spec wouldn't make the Web platform grow any faster, it would just mean big parts of the spec would languish even longer.
CSS3 got cut up into modules, and there was a long period of bickering about them, and CSS3 still isn't here.
Putting the product manager of the least compliant browser in charge of the next generation of HTML is like appointing a career street criminal as Attorney General.
I have no trouble believing that HTML5 is being delayed so that MS has enough time to implement it correctly.
(XHTML2 > HTML5)
Yeah I'll be doing a round of adding intro sections and generally adding examples and such at some point before the spec is done.
This seems to just an example of how HTML 5 strayed from the XHTML pack for no good reason. XHTML was already modularized ages ago...
Overview (from 2000)
http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/modularization
Final Spec (from 2006)
http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-modularization/
They have a track record of messing things up. It's that simple. Look at CSS in IE. What happened there? Even some of their HTML doesn't render right. I vote that the open-source browser makers out there make up these teams if it happens. They know what standards-compliance is all about.
Don't be stupid, Billy.
I beg your pardon, but why is this trolling? I am merely pointing out what I believe is the real motivating force behind their actions, given Microsoft's past and current actions. I believe they want to cut up HTML so they can leave important bits out while still being able to claim compliance. What's trolling about that?
once a thief....
Hackers have long memories. It works both ways.
So that menus can be dynamically loded, etc.
SSI is very nice feature and if a hosting company doesn't have it, I'm not hosting there (most of them has it now):
SSI
Read and Comment at my BLOG
!!!