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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."
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/
Yet your missing the fine print. There are Patents on OOXML, The Patent license which MSFT lets others duplicate OOXML specifically doesn't allow licenses that redistribute the patented software.
so you can't write an OOXML parser with the GPL, Apache, MPL, and several other licenses. Yet the ISO still allowed it to pass.
Enjoy the fine print. MSFT owns souls because of it. MP3 decoders are the same way. MSFT isn't the only company to endorse a standard that can't be implemented by anyone because of patent licensing restrictions.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
The browser makers and web designers really pushed for WHATAG standards and were about to push HTML5 over top of the W3C. It's a standard made of what people that WRITE web pages and people that WRITE web browsers want to see changed/fixed versus the last 8 years that nothing much has changed. Web designers need to have ALL the parts there, and browser makers need everybody to develop at the same time so people USE the specs.
I'd like to see a rollout schedule more than anything else. Release each module 3-6 months apart and allow no other non-spec addons until the whole thing is out. That would let Safari, Opera, Firefox keep up and let designers build the new sites organically rather than trying to use any random piece of a large spec all at once.
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.
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.
HTML5 doesn't actually have the problem of some parts being "delayed" because of other parts being immature -- the spec has annotations all the way down showing how stable each section is, and browsers (including Microsoft!) are implementing it. The HTML5 spec has been progressing much faster, with much more input being taken into account, than other specs at the W3C. In fact, splitting the spec would likely make things go significantly slower, since it would mean that there would be much more cross-group and cross-spec coordination to do.
As far as splitting out the spec goes, I don't think anyone especially disagrees that it should happen. The problem is that we don't have anyone who is volunteering to do the work.