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Microsoft Finally Joins HTML 5 Standard Efforts
bonch writes "On Friday, Microsoft posted to a mailing list that IE developers are reviewing the HTML 5 standard for future versions of Internet Explorer. They've given some feedback on the current editor's draft, saying that they 'have more questions than answers' and criticizing many of HTML 5's new tags, like <header>, <footer> and <aside>, calling them 'arbitrary' or unnecessary. It remains to be seen whether Microsoft waited too long to try to influence basic parts of the spec that most of their competitors have already adopted."
"It remains to be seen whether Microsoft waited too long to try to influence basic parts of the spec that most of their competitors have already adopted."
Whatever Microsoft decides to implement is going to become a defacto standard.
It's the sad but true result of still significant share of the browser market.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
It doesn't matter how long MS waited. They will just "extend" the standard and call all other implementations broken.
The usual journalistic nightmare of a summary.
They did not call header and footer arbitrary or unnecessary. They questioned the implementation as to validity for printing.
They did call aside arbitrary as well as section.
From reading the post, I see a lot of good insights into what might be an overly-cluttered and, in places, badly written standard. While there is always an element of Microsoft playing their own games, this does raise valid questions.
Trying to become famous by taking photos. Visit my homepage please.
While everyone should keep an eye on Microsoft (*was always) this is generally a good thing for the Internet as a whole. We as consumers, and we as web-developers, alike will be a lot happier if all the major players can create a consistent experience.
If Microsoft, Mozilla, Google, and Apple are all on board before the spec' is even in the final stages we have a fairly good shot of similar behavour no matter the platform or browser.
A lot of Microsoft's "notes" on the HTML 5 spec are either - "This isn't detailed enough to implement concistently" or "Do we need this?" Both of which are fair questions to ask and something that others will want to answer before HTML 5 goes live.
MSHTML 5 is coming.....
"We didnt like the standard so we improved on it"
Seriously, does anyone other than a first time Windows user actaully use IE for serious/prolonged web sessions?
Between Firefox, Opera and Safari, is IE still being used to any great extent?
Guaranteed! This comment 100% Anthrax free!
And MS does NOT play nice. Ever.
So while you might hope for a consistent experience MS has its own agenda. Burn this into your brain. MS NEVER PLAYS NICE.
Remember that story about MS donating code to linux under the GPL? Oh how nice they were, how they had turned around, how this was a new beginning.
Oops, no. Turns out that MS had used GPL code and they had to release their mods to stay compliant with the GPL. The fact that they tried to pretend they had different motives, makes everything they did questionable. So they did NOT release the code to improve interoperability, so what were there real motives for using GPL in the first place? (MS is more then capable enough to avoid using GPL code).
So, I ask myself what are MS real motives here? To improve HTML 5.0? Get clear exactly what they should implement? Nah. Delay? Possible. Make it less potent, possible. The point is, I do not know, but I do know from experience that whatever MS intrests are, working together for a greater future can't possible be it.
If MS is involved with HTML 5 then there are really only two options.
A: they realized that by staying out of it, even they risk loosing.
B: they hope by getting involved they can delay it until they can either make it their own somehow, someway, or just delay it for the sake of delay and hope it dies or that silverlight will have changed the web.
But whatever their reason, it ain't: lets make a better product for the future that everyone can use. It ain't the MS way. Never has, never will be.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
As Microsoft will be one of the foremost implementers of HTML5 (with IE still having a majority of the market share, unfortunately) it's a very good thing that Microsoft has decided to become involved in the spec rather than leaving it up to its competitors, giving it some notion of responsibility in how the spec turns out.
It seems some of the comments are looking for simple justification (such as why the >aside< tag exists, use cases, etc.) as well as more clear definitions of other new features (including their very own original contentEditable feature), and rather than "influence the spec" as the summary claims, it looks like the IE team is looking critically at how a completely new entity would approach HTML5 (not having had the vested involvement other browser makers have).
What remains to be seen, however, is if the IE team responds to the working group's justification and follows through on the spec, or if it only trusts its own judgment and implements the parts it deems "necessary". This is still the dogged-slow Microsoft team, and in spite of great improvements in IE7 and IE8, reporting issues in the spec during the Last Call stage is not an encouraging insight to their commitment to making HTML5 happen.
1. Embrace ...
Who knew there was a tag? And that MS has a better one? Apparently IE has supported all along, based on Netscape's invention, but will drop it in Windows 7.
They could have raised these complaints a long time ago. There is a process for this and they chose to ignore it.
welcome to 2001
MS definitely did a poor job of tracking the standards effort. Getting changes they want is unlikely. There is definitely the appearance and likelihood of MS just trying to impede the standard because every other major browser producer is way ahead of them on HTML5, and the features contained therein are a huge threat to IE. If Firefox, Opera, Chrome and Safari all support HTML5 and can give better video and interactive without Flash (and notably Silverlight), then Web devs may find it worth it to leave IE out of their support efforts to get out of having to use proprietary technologies with more cumbersome licensing circumstances.
That said, generally they have some points. Many of these tags to me seem analogous to ,, and similar tags from HTML that are widely regarded as a poor idea to use in the age of style sheets. The philosophy widely espoused with regard to modern web development is to separate content from presentation (much like much GUI application design philosophies). Many of the tags MS mentions seem to go against that design philosophy.
Some other criticisms are not along those lines (i.e. they don't question the validity of some tags, just if they are 'as valid' as other tags that could have been added with it. These criticisms seem a little more hollow at times without much substance.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Let me guess, Microsoft is going to try "OOXML'ing" HTML5?
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
Hear me out here....
I used to work with this horrible lady. No matter what was going on in the office, she would stick her nose in it. Many times she would look over my shoulder at some page I was coding or graphic design I was working on and say "can you make that a little bigger?" or "I don't like that color" (keep in mind, this woman was an accountant that had no business even coming into my area). Pretty much every suggestion she had was terrible ("no, I won't change the colors to yellow text on a black background").
The reason she did this was so that she could say that she had a hand in _____ project and because of all the projects that she was involved in, the company couldn't survive without her helping out everywhere.
The day we fired her we had an office wide party.
I say this because I get the feeling that this is what Microsoft is doing here. The spec is pretty much done. Rather than jump in at the beginning and really making a difference (thankfully they didn't, mind you), they're instead looking over someone's shoulder and saying "ooooo can you change that to Times New Roman?".
When its finally released MS's PR machine will say "Co-designed by Microsoft".
Extend, pending
Extinguish. soon
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Microsoft is the last one standing when it comes to the browser musical chairs... how exactly is their browser relevant anymore? Who uses it? WTF? Why?
Video and Audio tags are very cool. Get OGGed and Theora'd out Msie.
Get with HTML5 Msie!
Ask anyone who is in web publishing business. You can't replace Flash just by putting some fancy tags and video tag which doesn't have h264 just because of political, fanatical reasons.
If MS thinks they will hit flash that way, they are dreaming. No matter what nerds think, Adobe or Flash isn't going anywhere especially if their rival wannabe is idiot enough to drop PPC support on OS X and provide no kind of design/develop support on OS X. Eclipse/Mono? Yea, right.
They would propose Windows only VC-1 to Video element, they would ask for "Windows style" development support, they would give up (!) some patents to W3C and give "community promise" or some junk when asked if they really mean it...
They aren't fun to watch anymore, we learned all their tricks thanks to their puppets/trojan coders in open source community.
Funny that supporting Opera is nothing more than supporting W3C standards and give up 1990s lame tricks like browser sniffing. Same goes for Apple Safari (Webkit), Firefox.
It is not extra work, it is what they (webmasters) should be doing at first place.
HTML is a markup language. It tells the browser "this is a paragraph" or "this is important".
Telling the browser that the top section of a website (Slashdot's tab bar) or the bottom (the search bar, quote, copyright, and links at the bottom) is exactly the sort of thing the browser should know. Screen readers would, in particular, benefit from this; most people don't need to hear the header or footer on every page.
Unnecessary? Sure - websites do fine without it. But telling the browser more about the page is a Good Thing.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
So, they come late to the party, call the lead singer titless, and puke on the birthday cake.
So unlike the old Microsoft : )
You see, the web pages are really becoming complex with amazing dynamic tricks all over the place... The days of Firefox, Opera, Webkit developers give up the real work in hand and try to hack the code to fix (!!!) the rendering are over. There is simply no kind of manpower to keep up with their junk.
I always kept minimal compatibility with MS IE but the day IE 8 claimed my XHTML 1 strict front page has "errors" and I spent hours trying to fix non existent bug, I deleted Windows virtual machine forever. Enough really. I don't want people who doesn't have power/basic knowledge to install a compliant browser to be my customers anyway.
The amount of code that can be removed from a web app if you give the condition (!msie) is incredible. This is why more libraries do a check at initialization to determine if they're dealing with IE or "anything else", and then dynamically load the code for that environment.
I've started implementing a third condition to that: Is the browser non-IE && FF3+ || webkit (some chrome/safari feature sniffing) || Opera (again, some feature sniffing to see if it's from the past ~year). In these cases, the amount of code that's needed to be brought in, and the amount of bureaucracy that needs to be handled at runtime drops like a stone. The latest batch of browsers are amazingly fast and compliant.
Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
I notice that at weekends there are fewer MS astroturfers out and about. Why would that be?
As much as I hate people browser sniffing, I do however think Opera has the easiest way to do so: if (window.opera) {}; I guess they needed to add it, as it came with a browser-string-selection-menu-item.
New things are always on the horizon
I feel that it's always "finally" with Microsoft lately, they finally make a kind of secure OS, they finally follow this or that standard. It's annoying to hear people tell me Vista/7 is more secure than something like OSX, waving Pwn2Own around, when Microsoft have spent the last few decades ignoring standards and treating security as a very very afterthought. Seriously, if Microsoft worked to standards instead of coding something that works in some form or another and then expecting THAT to be the standard the computing world would be a lot better off.
It's what every decent webmaster has already done, right before starting to make their new site backwards compatible with the latest IE.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Neelie Kroes should demand that at the time of start-up, Microsoft lists the various browsers in any order Microsoft pleases, followed by HTML5 standard compliant or Not HTML 5 standard compliant
Bert
As much as I hate them, M$ is proving the point, once again, that nothing good can come from early adoption of an unfinished standard. This is the exact thing that made it a nightmare to write HTML in the late 90's and early 2000's. It's just recently gotten to the point where one can expect IE8, FF and Safari to do *almost* the same thing with respect to HTML, Javascript and CSS. The fact that M$ doesn't like parts of the spec underlines, once again, that acceptance and participation from the major players is just as important to the process as writing the spec. M$ should be able to influence the spec ... the thing is not going to be finalized for at least 5 years.
I'm not sure that is the right thought process to be applying, given that HTML 5 is supposed to extend HTML 4.01 ... regardless
of the specific feature in question.
One hopes that's just a really rushed/broken edit artifact,
not a real reflection of what they think.
I could believe many of their comments are appropriate, but it's worrisome to see one like that escaping orbit.
Adrian Bateman did himself and his team a disservice by putting so many unrelated comments into a single post. Yes they are all related to HTML 5 but then again the mailing list itself is about HTML 5 so the context is set and individual posts should be scoped more narrowly. The end result is that the list lacks priority and appears that each of the comments/feedback sections have the same priority when they really do not.
They bring up some interesting thoughts about a few of the tags/implementations but these are lost in the general negativity of the post.
Additionally some of their comments seem to be focused on unrelated topics such as how the header and footer elements should be handled when printing... ??? as if they are expecting the header and footer to be placed at the top of each printed page in a multi-page print out of a web page. While interesting as a topic of discussion this should not be lumped in with other comments as it is obviously a very low priority for a specification dealing with digital media primarily.
Add to this that they had previously stated that the header and footer elements appear to be unnecessary and I as a reader am left wondering which statement is more important - either they are unnecessary or they are useful but not as useful unless they implement something to do with printing the document... pick a stance Adrian. You can't state conflicting opinions like this and hope to be taken seriously.
So my suggestion for Adrian Bateman is to break up your feedback into more narrowly scoped questions so that they can be responded to in the priority they deserve. I can only think that your intent was to force others to do this work for you and thereby discover what others felt were the priority items to discuss or to set off a generally chaotic discussion of issues and thereby create dissension within the group, bringing up old concerns that have been discussed at length long ago and resolved or agreed to already.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
... the video functionality that, while officially removed from the HTML5 standard, will be implemented by everyone anyway...
I really don't know where this urban legend started and why people believe it, since it's trivial to verify that <video> has never been removed from HTML5.
What has been (hopefully temporary) removed is the mention of Ogg Theora as baseline format since Apple and Microsoft haven't yet accepted to implement it (Safari supports it anyway with the XiphQT component installed). OTOH, Mozilla, Google and Opera all support Ogg Theora (and Vorbis for audio) in their browsers (current of future versions), so apparently Theora is still the strongest candidate, altough Google may change this if they buy On2 and free the VP8 codec.
P.S.: sorry fanboys, H.264 is not an option: starting from 2011 websites with H.264 videos will have to pay an unspecified amount of money to the MPEG LA.
There's a hidden treasure in Python 3.x: __prepare__()
There goes the neighborhood...
~Just as a thing fails if it lacks a kernel, so too it fails if it lacks a skin. ~ Rumi, Discourses
For Microsoft, there's no such thing as "waited too long to try to influence" a standard. Any standard.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Indeed. As a former debugger developer I used to highlight this particular issue -- we even had a trade show cut-out figure named Bugsy Malone who was wanted for assaulting a global with a deadly pointer. (Hey, it gave the geeks a smile and the suits didn't know what it meant.)
However, as a developer I would say that bad pointers were at most 1% or 2% of our problems, if that. Non-thread-safe threaded code and leaked memory were much bigger issues at the time (1980's).
Microsoft sounds like a developer with a really bad arch, in some moment the requirements change and doesn't know how to fix it.
Does anyone else find it odd that MS is just now trying to get involved? Did they just join the HTML5 group? If so, this is pathetic. I think the real reason they are starting to make some noise is because Google just announced that they are hard at work making Chrome HTML5 compliant.
The real Sig captains the Northwestern. This one captains
I read the mailing list post by Microsoft. The overall impression is Microsoft mainly pouring cold water on the HTML 5 spec.
Why are they posting these objections just now? These tags appeared in the first official draft on the W3's web site a year and a half ago.
Let's review what we know about Microsoft:
1. If they could sell us paper plates for $1,000 each, they would.
2. If their browser held 99% market share, they would completely ignore this spec.
I can see how a programmer who has read a lot about "semantic purity" might think the new tags are superfluous. But is Microsoft a company known for its pursuit of elegance and academic purity? Its post is just plain rude. This late in the game, and so full of negativity (disguised as "questions"), it's the sign of a company grumpily giving in.
Now, about the alleged superfluity of the tags, you might as well call all tags but one, a generic <div> tag, superfluous. Just use one tag, and add classes to it (<div class="paragraph">, <div class="heading">.
<aside> has the same effect as <div class="aside"> but with the benefit to the programmer of less typing, and the benefit of the web of more uniformity (instead of <div class="aside">, <div class="marginalia">, and <div class="tangent"> in different web sites).
For a while I drank the "semantic" Kool-Aid. It has a point, but like most dogmas, taken to an extreme, it approaches absurdity. After a while, I returned to the table.
I have a much simpler solution. I take the subset of standard features that are well supported, and do the rest server-side.
They were a big force behind CSS, and look how awful their support has been for that. Leave them behind. They probably won't even notice for about 6 or 7 years, anyway.
Don't welcome MS to 2001.
It gives them too much credit. They haven't even reached 2000 yet.
MSFT doesn't really care except as a backup plan and to check out the competition and see how it can slow it down. Meanwhile MSFT will skip most standards and just implement Silverlight. Relegating the browser to irrelevance and enforcing a proprietary plug-in has always been the biggest threat to open browser standards, and way for MSFT to keep the desktop dominance. MSFT just wanted to make sure that before all Windows shops eventually toe the line on Silverlight, they can still live with apps on IE comparing to other newer browsers.
Slashdot: where the real summary is in the top rated post
come on you guys, does this mean anything new? Heck no, it's is the same old Microsoft doing the same old stuff. They don't support open standards and the only reason they have joined any standards group is to either mess it up, slow it down, or learn what is coming down the line so they can attack it.
You can go all they way back to the 80s and read about how they handled Go Inc to see how they work. They put people on committees or get their people involved to learn how to defeat them or at the very least to learn where they are going so they can devise a plan to defeat them. So the sooner these people are not allowed to join these groups the better off society will be. It's been over 20 years and they've not changed and keep doing the same stuff. Screw em and leave em behind so we can move forward is the way to address that company. IMO.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
You should just ask what the browser can do rather than the browser name. That is the number 1 issue.
Apple has put some great information regarding capabilities detection, it can be applied to any browser not just Safari/Webkit.
http://developer.apple.com/Internet/webcontent/objectdetection.html
(no account etc. needed)
You should sniff for the Gecko version rather then Firefox. I run Seamonkey (Build identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (OS/2; U; Warp 4.5; en-US; rv:1.9.1.3pre) Gecko/20090802 SeaMonkey/2.0b2pre) which uses the same browser code as Firefox.
I hate it when a site doesn't display or use features because I'm not running Firefox or tells me to update to Firefox.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Some magazines use layouts where a large article contains embedded blocks of supplementary "sidenote" information, which the main body text flows around. This sort of style is becoming increasingly common on webpages, because CSS makes it easier to do. So for search engine analysis or mobile readers or speech synthesisers, once you've tagged the navigation bar(s) and the main article and the other components, you're left with these little floating titbits, which might be potentially important to the article, but which might not correctly link to any specific point in the article (top, bottom, or middle).
So to tag them, you need something like "aside" to tag them as belonging to the article, but not belonging to any particular position in the main linear narrative. If you used "section" for them, then the order of these sections compared to the others would suggest a specific sequence to read them in, which would be wrong.
If it's accompanying explanatory information that might be useful to the reader while they're reading the main article body, you don't want it exiled to the end of the article. The "aside" tag (or something very like it) would seem to be required for short sections of supplementary narrative that are intended to be parallel to the main bodytext.
Eric Baird
Who do I need to talk to in order to get paid for pro-microsoft posts on slashdot? I could use a few extra bucks.
Someone now does a websearch for the keyword term "traction engine" using Bing, and they find that your blog seems to have >300 posts mentioning that very subject. Then they get quite pissed off with you, because they keep visiting pages on your site and finding that the blog entries referenced don't have anything at all to say about their favourite subject. What's happened is that when you posted the article, the title got copied into the auto-maintained "recent posts" list widget on your blog's sidebar, and the Google and Bing search engines don't know how to distinguish between the linked text in your blog widgets and the contents of the main article. And not only does Google now think that you have 300 separate pages on traction engines, but since you included that cute little widget that lists the current top ten stories on CNN, Google and Bing also thinks that you have 300 blog postings about Michael Jackson, and also about a bunch of unsavoury keyword stuff that's currently in the news.
So if someone's seriously asking, do we really need HTML5 to support a way of allowing authors and blogging engines to voluntarily tag sections as belonging to an article or just to a nav bar, then the answer is "hell yes", we certainly do if we want search engines to continue to work properly.
The "MS team" studying the HTML5 draft spec is supposed to already =know= stuff like this. They're representing a company that actually owns a major search engine, for crying out loud.
Eric Baird
I use Iceweasel and I officially hate you.
I do sniff for gecko. Instead of "FF3+" I should have said that I checked for a list of capabilities and infer from there. I never do a specific browser-sniff per say, but if "document.all" is there and so is "attachEvent", then I know what I'm dealing with. I always feature-sniff and then condition the imports, but in practice I meant that the newer crop of browsers are quite capable and require relatively little fiddling and vestigial bug-handling.
Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
If non-ie browsers adopt HTML5, MS can actually get a partial benefit from losing market share. If more sites use HTML5-features, older MS software won't work with that, so users will have an incentive to drop older MS software. IE8++ may very well be available only for windows 7.
If they did try to implement parts of it early before the spec was drawn up and the final spec was different, they'd be accused of undermining standards. The fact that every browser is implementing HTML 5 slightly differently at the moment (look at the video tag) would be ignored.
Microsoft complains about arbitrary and unnecessary keywords in a language ... CLASSIC! Sorry, am still laughing.
I think that Microsoft long thought that it could dominate the web, for the very reason you point out, that the sheer mass of numbers would force development in IEs direction, and I think Microsoft was mainly trying to, once again, undermine the web via XAML and silverlight, mainly aimed at Adobe. But the fact is that in spite of Microsoft's best efforts, standards compliant browsers are gaining marketshare over IE, and on top of this the promise of HTML5 is that propriety technologies like XAML, Silverlight and Flash will become obsolete. This is why Microsoft is joining the HTML5 standard; they want to undermine it.
Microsoft wants to do a "fillibuster" or delying tactic on the HTML5 spec in order to push the adoption of Silverlight and XAML, both of which are somewhat stillborn outside of strongly Microsoft shops.
The only thing from Microsoft I want standardized are the scrollbars... I don't need all the other trashy stuff.
...is Microsoft's lack of comment on video and audio. Who cares about the aside element?
The future of HTML 5 in terms of hardware, software and the law is difficult to predict:
But isnt putting search-engine needs into the HTML spec sort of silly?
"His name was James Damore."
That's why I hate browser sniffing, you are not supposed to do it. I knew that. :-)
New things are always on the horizon
I've been a serial lurker in the WHATWG/W£C mailing lists for the past 4 years and it's clear MS has been paying little to no attention, for example they correctly note that the date/time inputs are required to represent their values in UTC (to an extent) but then go on to bemoan the fact that the spec does not specify how a user would select their UTC offset (i.e time zone). The spec is clear that browsers are free to impliment the user interface to do pretty much whatever the hell they like (e.g. present a time zone picker as an "advanced" mode of time input) but *requires* the POST/GET data to be formatted in UTC for the sake of the backend server application - because POST/GET is string based and there needs to be no ambiguity as far as the server is concerned about the data it is receiving, which UTC/ISO date strings do.
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
You know, when Apple wrote that document, Safari 1.0 was out (or it was even not final), IE was enjoying gigantic marketshare, Mozilla/Firefox was struggling for market and only "mobile web browsing" was WAP or pricey Opera.
These days, the market is really crazy and there is no way to identify a browser with name. For example, Symbian UIQ3 is dead right? Right after its chapter 11 reported, Opera 9.5 for UIQ3 shipped with iPhone like features. Some other super advanced Webkit based browser followed it. This is for some platform even Sony itself abandoned, I can't imagine the scene on Symbian S60 and Windows.
All those sites which were formulated as "If it is IE or Firefox" must be spending huge time and money to do exactly what Apple and Opera was suggesting for years.
Another ready made solution is Yahoo's browser support scheme which is graded browser support:
http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/articles/gbs/
I am replying to you but in fact, I want to inform others about the easy solutions already done and live on 250M unique users/days sites. My original reply had same intentions too. Somehow, Yahoo's free and open solutions are unknown to developers out there.
Not really. The web was always supposed to be semantically tagged, so that its information could be analysed and trawled and processed automatically (remember header keyword tags?). It was supposed to be one giant tagged datastore, and the sematic tagging was supposed to work as future-proofing. If the meaning of the information was unambiguous, then future systems could adapt their output to express that meaning automatically, without the original web author having to continually go back and rewrite code. The same page could be rendered for a 40-inch colour widescreen or a 1-inch monochrome watch display, or braille, or a speech interface, or anything else.
Document structure was always supposed to be transparent and machine-readable, and the original plan was always that logical structure should always take precedence over the more "trivial" matter of how the thing might display on a particular generation of browser.
When things like the "font" tag started becoming popular, there was a worry that people would start focussing too much on display specifics and would start packing their page code with twee display instructions that could screw up the structural purity of the resulting HTML.
So part of the motivation for CSS was to return HTML code to its previous state of logical purity, and exile all the visual formatting instructions to a separate section or a separate file. That way, if a computer's analysing someone's paper on particle physics, it can read the equations and attempt to understand the content and context by recognising that certain words are emphasized ("em", "strong"), rather than having to try to interpret whether there's any special significance to the idea that some words are, say, different colours or fonts or display strengths. //convey// meaning, but that meaning wasn't easily understandable without looking at how the output ended up being rendered on a screen. A text reader doesn't know how to interpret the additional information. To work out which words are stressed, it'd have to work out the background colour, which might be a composite of several layers of tables, munge that resulting colour with the effect sof any background bitmaps, then calculate the contrast to the specified font colour ...
One of the reasons why "font" is now frowned on as a tag is because is because it doesn't have an obvious syntactical meaning - people ending up using it to
It was also more difficult to get information back out of the "font" tag because of the number of optional fields that might appear in any order, and because "font" contained too much data and tended to break up logical block-marks. If you used "strong" to embolden a paragraph, then that paragraph was obviously emboldened as a block, with additional formatting within the block as necessary. If you used "font" to embolden the paragraph, then every time there was a formatting change within the the paragraph that was also being rendered with "font" (subtext, italic, etc), authoring tools would tend to fracture the larger "font" command and duplicate its contents through a string of smaller font commands, destroying the original clearly-nested nested structure. It'd look the same on the page, but to parsing software, the original clear command "this whole paragraph is emboldened" would be replaced by a string of little "embolden this, and this, and this and this ..." commands.
So "font" was certainly general-purpose and could be used to replace a whole slew of more dedicated syntactical commands, but that ubiquity was part of what made it Evil.
The problem that we're currently facing with HTML is that "div" (and "span") have become the new "font". Usage of the old machine-readable "hr" tag is fading away, and people are increasingly using "div" for everything. But if everything on a page is a "div", then semantically it becomes almo
Eric Baird
Opera has a few quirks. For instance, I had to remove named entities from my xhtml and use numbered ones instead. Opera would display them incorrectly. It was immediately obvious when I started serving as application/xhtml+xml because my skip link had a in it as part of a hack to trigger hasLayout in IE. That said, Opera is awesome. They are hands down doing the best job with SVG. Webkit is close on their heels, but then opera has better support for SMIL as well from what I read...
Customer: Why can't I use your shopping site?
Designer: You have a crap browser.
Customer: You have a crap site. I'm going to your competitor.
Designer: Victory!
(2 weeks later)
Designer: Would you like fries with that?